Angel of Mercy
by Swarovski
Summary: Mac is missing, and Stella and Don need to put their differences aside and find him before it's too late. Multiple POVs. SMacked & Flack. First fanfic!
1. I never suspected anything

**Disclaimer**: All CSI:NY characters are the property of Anthony Zuiker and CBS.

**Author's note**: This story has 10 chapters (+ epilogue), takes places over three days, and is based on multiple points-of-view. I've chosen to borrow my overall theme from another TV show ("everybody lies") and explore different reasons for why people tell lies. Therefore every chapter (with _one_ possible exception) ends with a lie, and only the readers will actually know the whole truth.

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><p><strong>Chapter 1 - "I never suspected anything"<strong>

**Dr. Rajiv Patel, Tuesday noon**

"Do you recognize this man?"

Dr. Rajiv Patel looked down at the grainy, black-and-white photo that the curly-haired detective pushed across the table towards him. She sat quietly watching him as he studied the photo, while her tall, blue-eyed partner paced the ER staff room restlessly. The two NYPD detectives had introduced themselves when they flashed their badges, but now Patel was too nervous even to recall their names.

She had asked a fair question - the blood-streaked face of the man lying on the gurney would have been unrecognizable to most people. But the question still worried Patel. He could tell that the image had been taken by a security camera at the hospital earlier the same morning. So he knew that the detectives had been checking hospital surveillance tapes. But in that case, they already knew that they were interviewing the right doctor, because he had been the only Asian doctor on call in the ER this morning_. So why the cat-and-mouse game?_

"Yes, I recognize him," Patel replied, his mind racing. What did these two detectives want from him? _Did they suspect him of being negligent?_ _Had this patient died of his injuries?_ "As you probably already know, I treated this man just a few hours ago in the ER. But I cleaned the blood off his face after I finished suturing the gash on his forehead. So this picture must have been taken earlier." He pushed the photo back across the table, the detectives watching him in silence. If their intention had been to make him feel uncomfortable, they certainly were succeeding.

"He's a John Doe," Patel added, rather pointlessly, since the female detective had the patient's file in her hands. He saw a shadow of anxiety fall across her beautiful features, making her face look drawn and closed.

"Twelve stitches, and a couple of broken ribs," she said, looking up from the file. "I see you also noted that your patient had another, previous injury."

"Yes, he had a bandage on what appeared to be a recent knife wound on his upper abdomen."

"What happened next?" the man asked, stopping to pick up the patient file from his partner's hands.

"Well, I suspected the patient had a concussion, possibly even a fractured skull. So I sent him on to radiology for a CT scan." He paused, glancing back to the woman. "May I ask what this is about, detective?"

"Who took him to radiology?" the male detective interrupted, looking up from the file.

"My nurse had been called away to assist with a couple of drunk car crash victims. So the paramedic who had brought him to the ER volunteered instead. He seemed to know his way around, so I let him. Look, what's going on? Am I in some kind of trouble?"

"Maybe," the male detective replied sourly, pacing the room again. "We're trying to locate your John Doe. Did you happen to see which way the paramedic took him?"

"No, I wasn't really paying attention." Dr. Patel shook his head in relief. The detectives weren't accusing him of anything after all. This was about the John Doe instead. "Well, I'm not surprised, really," he added, "if this patient just wandered out of the building."

"Oh? What makes you say that?" The man stopped and his blue eyes fixed Patel in an angry stare.

Patel shrugged. "A typical substance abuser, he seemed completely oblivious to the situation. He kept yanking my sleeve and trying to pull his oxygen mask off. He even kicked the medic a few times." He frowned at the memory of his most difficult ER patient of the morning. "I was grateful the medic could hold him down for me."

"And what _exactly_ makes you think he was an addict?"

"The medic told me so." Patel watched the two detectives exchange glances.

"Dr. Patel, is this the paramedic you're referring to?" The woman held up a sketch of a dark haired man in his mid-thirties. "Do you know his name?"

"Yes, that's him." Patel frowned, confused by their line of questioning. _If this was about the John Doe, then why did the detectives have a sketch of the medic? _"And no, I don't know his name."

"Wasn't he wearing an ID?"

Patel thought back to the morning. "I think it was clipped onto his trousers. I didn't really see it."

"What else did this paramedic tell you?" the male detective asked. "Is it normal for you to treat patients whose hands are tied?"

_Was that the problem?_ Patel recalled that the patient's hands had been tied together with a white plastic cord. "Actually," he said, "it's not an uncommon sight with violent patients in the ER. Apparently, this John Doe had attacked an elderly couple in a shopping mall. A security guard had tackled him and tied his hands. It looked like he had put up quite a struggle."

"Oh, really?" The male detective's eyebrows shot up. "The medic told you all that?" He glanced at his colleague again. "So you're telling me it didn't bother you _at all_ that his hands were tied?"

"On the contrary," Patel answered, bristling at the detective's sarcasm. "The medic told me the patient had also tried to attack him in the ambulance. That's why the cord was still on his wrists. I wasn't taking any chances, so I just left it on as well."

Patel watched the woman close her eyes and pinch the bridge of her nose wearily. _This is definitely not a routine missing person's case_, he thought. The crime that this John Doe had committed had to be pretty serious for the NYPD to send two detectives. And there had to be some kind of personal reason for them to be so upset.

"So, what did this guy do after I finished with him?" Patel huffed. "Kill a cop or something?" It was the only excuse he could think of for the male detective's hostile behavior.

The woman stared at him in disbelief, anger slowly creeping across her face.

"No, Dr. Patel," she said firmly. "I can tell you for a fact that your patient has _never_ killed a cop." She pushed the security camera photo and the sketch across the table again. "But _this_ man over here, however," she added, placing a finger on the picture of the paramedic, "may yet turn out to be a cop killer." Then she pointed to the photo of the injured man on the gurney. "Because this man over here _is_ a cop. He's the head of the New York Crime Lab."

Patel gasped. _Could this really be true?_ He tried to recall the morning's events in light of the detectives' unexpected revelation. He remembered that the patient had worn a faded sweat suit - had he actually been a senior police officer? _Was that really possible?_ It didn't seem to make any sense at all. How could they expect him to have known this?

"What's more," the male detective added with a snarl, "we believe that it was your _pal_ the paramedic who attacked Detective Taylor. Right here at the hospital. And now they're both missing."

"Wait!" Patel interrupted, his mind still reeling. "How was I supposed to know that the medic was lying to me? As an ER trauma doctor, I have to make split-second decisions all the time. I have to assume people around me are telling the truth. _You_ must know what I'm talking about. It can't really be all that different from your own job, detective."

"On the contrary, I always assume that people around me are lying. Like you are right now, for example."

Patel shot the man an angry look. "But your _colleagues_ don't lie to you, I presume?" he shouted.

"Well, this medic wasn't your colleague, was he now, Dr. Patel?" the detective shouted back. "We're still trying to work out who the _hell_ he really was! And I'm finding it _really_ hard to believe that you never suspected anything."

"I still don't understand. If the paramedic attacked Detective Taylor himself, why would he bring him to the ER afterwards?"

"That's exactly what we're trying to find out," the woman answered quietly.

"But he must work at the hospital! I'm sure I've seen him here several times before."

"Oh, yeah, really?" The man rolled his eyes. "Well, Detective Bonasera and I have a meeting with the hospital director this afternoon. We'll be sure to tell him that you think our suspect is in fact an employee at this hospital, and see what he thinks of that!"

"I think we're done for now, Dr. Patel, so thank you for your cooperation," the woman interrupted, standing up. "I've asked my colleague Dr. Hawkes to drop by the ER and talk to you later. I just have one final question for you myself. Given Detective Taylor's injuries, would you say the medic saved his life by bringing him to the ER?"

"Oh yes, I would definitely say so." Patel nodded. "He was just minutes away from going into shock from the blood loss -" He paused, experiencing an unexpected sense of _dejà vu_. He suddenly remembered that the paramedic had asked him the very same question in the ER, which _had_ actually been rather strange. When Patel had replied "Yes", the medic had just smiled, pointed to himself, and said "Angel of mercy" to the John Doe. At the time, Patel thought he was telling the patient the name of the hospital. But now he recalled how the two men had stared at each other, and he had noticed the fear in the injured man's eyes. When they had left, Patel had just shrugged off the incident, even forgetting about it until now. But for a second - just for a split second - he had _known_ that the medic's story didn't add up.

As Patel got up to leave the staff room, the male detective handed him his card. "If you think of _anything_, call us, okay? Now, I'm going to ask you one last time, doc. Didn't you - even for _one_ moment - think that something was wrong?"

Patel glanced down at the card in his hand before looking the detective straight in the eyes. _Why should he admit his doubts to this hotheaded young detective?_ "No, Detective Flack, I never suspected anything."

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><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 2: "Nothing happened between us"<strong>

**Early Tuesday afternoon: Stella Bonasera's point of view**

Stella, Don and the rest of the CSI team try to work out what exactly happened to Mac, and we find out why Stella is particularly upset.


	2. Nothing happened between us

**Author's note**: A special thanks to those of you who were so kind to review the previous chapter: lily moonlight, Lilmizmoz, tlh45, mav32, Scampfish, Detective-Yellow-Turtle, gluegirl56 and Herrera.

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><p><strong>Chapter 2 - "Nothing happened between us"<strong>

**Stella Bonasera, early Tuesday afternoon**

"Can you _believe_ that guy, Stella?"

In the ER staff room at Angel of Mercy, Don was pacing the floor restlessly again after Dr. Patel had left. "I mean, as a doctor, he took an oath to do no harm, for God's sake. I just _know_ he was lying to us. I could see it in his eyes!"

Seated at the staff room table, Stella Bonasera considered Don's words, her mind still reeling from the morning's dramatic course of events. After several frantic hours of searching the hospital, they had to conclude reluctantly that Mac and his attacker were already gone. At the moment, Danny and Sheldon were still processing the laundry room and would join them in the ER staff room, when they were done. _This isn't really happening._ Stella felt overwhelmed and numb, like being trapped in a nightmare from which she was unable to rouse herself.

"Patel's lying all right," she conceded, "but I'm not sure about what. Right now we need to focus on the fake medic, though, not the real doctor."

"But it can't just be a coincidence, Stella. They must somehow be working together, Mac's attacker and that lying doctor. You know how Mac's always telling us not to believe in coincidences at crime scenes."

Stella shook her head with a frown. "I really can't see them working together. It's just way too elaborate. The medic could easily have finished Mac off in that laundry room. And I believe that Patel really _did_ save Mac's life in the ER."

"Either way, our perp is a pretty cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch. He took a huge risk taking Mac down to the ER while my officers were already searching the hospital."

"Well, at the time, we thought we were looking for an orderly, not a paramedic," she reminded him.

"Why would this guy first nearly kill Mac, then take the time to save his life, and then abduct him from hospital? What does he want from Mac? It just doesn't make any sense."

"We're probably dealing with a very sick or disturbed person, so sense doesn't come into it." Stella rubbed her temples with her fingertips, trying to get her mind to focus. _Were they overlooking something obvious?_ "The question we need to ask ourselves is whether he wants Mac alive or dead. Maybe he doesn't know himself. It's almost like he can't make up his mind."

"Okay, let's for a moment suppose the doctor isn't involved. This still _must_ have something to do with Mac being a cop. Someone who has a serious grudge against him. Maybe even someone connected to the bodega robbery last night. After Mac was stabbed in that alley, someone could have followed him here to finish the job."

Stella frowned and bit her lip. "I can't see how this has anything to do with what happened to Mac last night. You interviewed the two robbers yourself at the precinct. Does it seem likely that they would send someone to go after Mac?"

Don sighed and shook his head reluctantly. "No, they were just a couple of kids with a switchblade. So you don't think this is connected to Mac's job, at all?"

"I don't know." She picked up the sketch of the medic and studied it closely. "Mac has a great memory for faces, and he certainly didn't recognize this guy, when he met him. And neither did I, for that matter."

"C'mon, Stella," Don countered. "Mac has seen thousands of faces in his job. No one expects him to remember everyone. And it doesn't have to be anyone that he has _actually_ met. It could be a friend, relative, coworker, cell mate. Anyone who knows someone with a grudge against him. Mac's been putting people away for years - we could be looking at half of New York City!"

Stella shook her head again. "Now don't get me wrong, Flack. It would make things a lot easier for us if this were somehow connected to Mac's job. That way, there'll be evidence somewhere, possibly in our case files, linking the two of them. If it was just a random attack, on the other hand, then our best lead to finding Mac will be tracking down how they left the hospital."

"My money's still on the doctor. You saw yourself how defensive he was."

Stella glanced up at Don, wishing he'd stop going on about Patel, so they could actually move on. Shouting at their only witness wasn't exactly helping the investigation, and she had noticed how Patel had clammed up during the interview. "We sometimes make even innocent people defensive when we interview them." They had to eliminate Patel from their investigation quickly, before they wasted any more time on him. "Especially you, Flack," she added.

"I can't believe you're dismissing the doctor like that," he huffed, rankled by her reproachful words. "I think you're making a serious mistake here, Stella."

"Well, let's wait to hear what Sheldon has to say when he's done interviewing Stratton and Patel. He'll be able to give us an overview of Mac's injuries, so we have a time frame for finding him. We have to assume that wherever he is now, he's not getting any more medical attention," she added grimly.

"Hey, this is Mac we're talking about." Don put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed it lightly. "I'm sure that wherever he is now, he's literally alive and kicking. Mac's a marine, remember? Don't worry, he'll be fine."

Stella frowned, once again irritated at Don, despite his obvious attempt at reconciliation. _That's exactly the problem_, she thought. Mac had a long-standing habit of rushing headlong into trouble - even risking his life - without stopping to think, which she blamed squarely on his marine training. For years, she had watched how he struggled with insomnia, ran himself ragged, and even put himself in harm's way, while she was forever reminding him to take better care of himself. In fact, she thought bitterly, as recently as this morning, she had warned him that he was pushing his luck.

She let her mind wander back to the five hours that had passed since Mac had disappeared. By now, she and Don had been over the same ground countless times already, trying to make sense of what had happened. And despite the growing tension between them, she was grateful to have Don at her side, sensing his deep personal concern for Mac's life.

Early that morning, when she had phoned Don, shouting frantically that Mac was missing, he had arrived within minutes with a half dozen officers to search the hospital premises. Still shaken, Stella had quickly called in Danny and Sheldon before sitting down to describe the orderly to an NYPD sketch artist. Luckily, Mac had been carrying Stella's cell phone when he disappeared, and by tracing the phone's GPS, they had quickly located the hospital laundry room.

Don and the three CSI's had walked into the laundry room together, taking care not to step on the smeared blood spatter on the floor in the doorway. When Sheldon flicked on the lights, they stood in silence for a moment, expertly taking in the evidence of Mac's struggle with his assailant. "Holy shit!" Danny finally exclaimed, exhaling loudly. "If all of this is Mac's blood ..." Despite leaving the sentence hanging, he somehow still managed to sum up what they were all thinking. Feeling sick to her stomach, Stella squatted down and studied the bloody handprints on the floor. Danny and Sheldon immediately began putting up markers and taking photos, while Don left to make some phone calls before meeting up with Stella and the hospital security guards.

To their dismay, the state of security at Angel of Mercy could only be said to be patchy, at best. Staff ID badges were conspicuously old-fashioned, duty rosters were incomplete, and no one seemed to know the procedures for dealing with violent crimes on the premises. Despite repeated urgent messages, the head of hospital security continued to be unavailable.

Realizing that they wouldn't be getting much support from the hospital, Don quickly called in more reinforcement from his precinct. The NYPD officers soon discovered that the alarms on several ground floor fire doors had been disabled by hospital staff stepping out to smoke. "Any gas station has better security than this damned hospital," Don grumbled to Stella, as his officers reported their findings back to him.

Standing in the security control room, Stella and Don learned that the hospital surveillance cameras were concentrated near the main entrances, the ER, and the elevators, with very few cameras installed on the patient wards themselves. Somehow, Mac's attacker had succeeded in avoiding all of them when he had led Mac from his hospital room down to the laundry room. After a frustrating full hour of watching low-grade security camera footage on the monitors, a hospital guard finally spotted something unusual: a paramedic was pushing a gurney with an injured patient from the wards towards the ER. The medic was holding what looked like a towel against the patient's forehead, partly obscuring his blood-streaked face.

"It's really hard to tell," Stella said, biting her lip, "but that _could_ be the orderly that I saw Mac leave with. If that's the case, our perp is wearing a paramedic uniform now."

Don leaned forward to get a closer look at the screen. "Then that means it's Mac there on the gurney," he added angrily. "Damn it!" He slammed his open hand on the table before pointing at the screen. "Look, his hands are tied! Why didn't anyone spot this sooner?" He stormed out of the control room to inform his officers about the suspect's change of uniform.

And now, several hours later in the ER staff room, she and Don were starting to bicker, the tension of still not being any closer to finding Mac gradually getting to them. Stella picked up the security camera photo lying on the table and studied it closely, trying somehow to glean more information from the grainy image. If Mac had been fighting Patel and the medic in the ER only minutes later, he had to still be conscious when this footage had been taken. _What was going on in his mind at the time? Did he realize what was happening to him?_ Feeling the tears well up in her eyes, she struggled to fight them back, not wanting to cry in front of Don. _It had just been too good to be true_, she thought miserably. _Now he's slipping through my fingers like sand, and it's my fault that he's gone._ She let her thoughts drift back to the events that had led up to Mac's disappearance.

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><p>Several months had passed since Stella had first noticed a gradual change in Mac. The Crime Lab had been working around the clock to provide crucial evidence in a string of headline cases, garnering both public praise from the mayor and the personal approval of Deputy Commissioner Roberts. Stella knew Mac was still having his regular run-ins with Chief of Detectives Sinclair, who as always seemed unwilling to acknowledge their accomplishments. However, much to Sinclair's displeasure, the lab's high-profile successes had given Mac enough political leverage to negotiate a unique exemption from city-wide NYPD budget cuts. After all these years of locking horns, Mac was finally getting the upper hand against the Chief.<p>

The public recognition of his team's professionalism pleased Mac greatly, and - despite a punishing schedule - he had diligently presented all the court evidence on behalf of the lab. He despised the ensuing media attention, though, and had delegated all the press briefings to Stella instead. As his second-in-command, she was happy to be able to support him in a task that she actually secretly relished.

Later, when the pressure of the lab's workload had dropped back to normal again, Stella thought that Mac actually appeared more relaxed and rested for the first time she could remember. He was even smiling more often than she had seen him do in years. By now, she had become so accustomed to his serious work face that she had quite forgotten how much better an easy smile suited him.

It was during this time that Stella had caught Mac staring at her on a few occasions, seemingly unaware of the fact himself at first. At the time, she had been confused, checking her clothes self-consciously and even running her tongue over her teeth. Without really thinking about it, she began staring back at him, paying more attention to the way he moved his hands and arched his eyebrows, even noticing the real color of his eyes for the first time. Often, when he spoke to the team during staff meetings, she found herself watching his mouth move, without actually hearing his words. Once, standing side by side in the elevator, their eyes had met for a few very long seconds, and he had looked down with an awkward smile, his face coloring with embarrassment. At that moment, she realized there was nothing absent-minded about his staring, and she had flushed herself as well. For the first time in years, she began entertaining the thought that they could be more than just partners and friends, and she found that she could definitely get used to the idea.

Thinking back to Monday night now, Stella had to admit that when she first heard that Mac had been stabbed, her initial anxiety had quickly turned into anger. Once again, Mac had been reckless with his own life in the line of duty. Leaving the lab just before midnight, he happened to come across a robbery in progress at a bodega near his apartment. Without a second thought, he had pursued one of the robbers out through the back door and into an alley, getting himself stabbed in the stomach for his efforts. Fortunately, the injured bodega owner had already dialed 911, and an ambulance had rushed them both to Angel of Mercy.

When Stella and Danny heard the news, they had been busy working a double homicide across town. Quickly wrapping up their investigation, they delegated the final formalities to one of the officers on the scene. Stella vaguely remembered ranting about Mac's recklessness to Danny as he drove through the late-night city traffic.

Mac's stab wound was fairly deep, but his blood loss had been minimal, and he had not suffered serious damage to any internal organs. Even so, the knife blade had nicked his diaphragm, and the attending physician, Dr. Stratton, had recommended that he stay overnight in order to monitor his breathing. Of course, Mac had gruffly insisted that he was perfectly fine, but to Danny's great surprise, he let Stella persuade him to stay without much protest. In return, she offered to pick him up first thing in the morning and bring a change of clothes from his apartment. Before leaving together with Danny, she had hugged Mac briefly and given him a little kiss on the cheek. He let his hand linger on the back of her neck, his fingertips softly caressing her skin, and the tingling sensation had given her a long and restless night.

It had therefore been with some anticipation that she returned to the hospital early Tuesday morning, a duffel bag with his running clothes in her hand. She smiled to herself as she rode up to his ward in the elevator. Mac had specifically asked her to bring another suit, but she had mischievously decided to interpret this as a sweat suit.

When she arrived at his room, he was already sitting up on his bed, while Dr. Stratton listened to his lungs with a stethoscope. Mac smiled silently at her as she entered and put his bag down on a chair. When the doctor finally finished, Mac noticed her staring at his bare, bandaged chest, and had shyly put his top back on.

After Dr. Stratton left, Mac picked up the duffel bag and slipped into the adjacent bathroom. When she was sure he had to be dressed, Stella put her head around the bathroom door and flashed a smile at him. "You need any help in there?"

He had been squatting down to tie his shoelaces and stood up with a wince as she entered the bathroom.

"I'm fine, really, Stella," he replied, patting the bandage under his sweatshirt lightly, before starting to shave in front of the bathroom mirror. "But I'm not exactly dressed for a day at the office," he added dryly.

"That's because you're not fine, Mac." She had already noticed the open bottle of painkillers by the sink. "I distinctly heard Stratton say you needed plenty of rest."

"Plenty of rest, huh?" He glanced at her in the mirror, his mouth curling into a wry smile, before he continued shaving. "And what exactly did you have in mind for me today, then?"

Stella didn't answer, but just stood with her hands against the wall behind her, watching him shave. Her mind was already filled with a million different plans for spending the day together. When he had rinsed and dried his face, they just stood there, smiling at each other warmly for a minute, uncertain of what to do next.

"C'mon, Stella Bonasera, let's do this," he finally said, putting his arm around her waist and pulling her gently towards him. With one hand, he brushed back her curls, and with the other he lifted up her chin before kissing her softly on the lips. Stella closed her eyes and met his lips with her own hungry kisses, putting one hand on his newly shaven cheek.

Thinking back to the moment now, Stella deeply regretted what she had said next. "Promise me that you won't chase armed suspects into alleys again, Mac. Some day, your incredible Taylor luck will run out."

"Hey, I didn't realize he still had the knife until it was too late," he murmured, playing with her curly hair. "I couldn't just let him get away."

She put her finger on his lips to silence him. "I mean it, Mac." She kissed him again and replaced the finger. "You're not a young marine any longer, so don't go looking for trouble. Play it smart next time, promise me." Another kiss. _Oh, this felt so right!_ She could definitely get used to this. _Why the hell hadn't they done this years ago?_

"Okay, I promise," he said with a smirk, not taking her seriously. He put his arms around her shoulders, pulling her even closer. "You've really got to stop worrying, Stella."

"You need someone to take care of you."

Rolling his eyes, he straightened up, and she could tell that she had injured his pride. "Hey, I can take care of myself."

"Then what are you doing here, Mac? You know what they say, fools rush in ..."

"What," he huffed, slightly insulted, "now you're calling me foolish?"

"I guess what I'm saying is that you sometimes need an ... angel to take care of you." She was still holding her hand against his cheek, her thumb caressing his face, enjoying the intimacy of the moment.

Just as he opened his mouth to reply, they heard a polite cough. Stella reluctantly turned her eyes away from Mac's face and saw a tall, dark-haired man in a blue uniform standing outside the bathroom door. She and Mac glanced at each other and laughed, embarrassed that they could have been so oblivious. _How much of their conversation had he already overheard?_

"Mac Taylor?" the man said. "Dr. Stratton has requested one final x-ray before you're ready to be discharged."

Just then, Stella's cell phone rang in her pocket, and now their special moment had definitely passed. As she had expected, it was Don demanding to know how Mac was doing. "Well, he says he's fine, Flack, but why don't you ask him yourself?" she said, handing the phone to Mac, who was about to leave with the orderly. "Go ahead, take the phone with you, Mac. I'll wait for you here," were the last words she said to him.

While she waited, Stella's mind eagerly skipped ahead to Mac's return, looking forward to finishing whatever it was they had just started. She hoped that he was actually being serious about this, not just responding to some kind of temporary rush after surviving the knife attack. With any luck, she was going to find out exactly how much his injury was going to interfere with his movements the rest of the day.

After half an hour, she began glancing at her watch impatiently, initially because she needed her phone back to let Danny know she'd be taking the day off. After another 20 minutes, she checked with the nurses' station and learned to her horror that Dr. Stratton hadn't ordered any additional x-rays. Breathlessly, she borrowed a phone to call her own cell phone repeatedly. Getting no answer, she alerted hospital security before calling Don.

* * *

><p>"Stella, I need you to focus here," Don interrupted her thoughts, bringing her right back to the ER staff room. "Apparently, there's an ambulance unaccounted for."<p>

"What!" she gasped at the audacity of the getaway vehicle. "Are you seriously suggesting they left the hospital in an ambulance?"

"Well, our suspect was dressed as a paramedic, and Mac was last seen lying on a gurney. Security being what it is around here, probably no one thought to stop them." Don's expression lightened up for the first time since his arrival at Angel of Mercy. "But it's not all bad news, Stella. An ambulance shouldn't be that hard to trace. Even if our perp has somehow managed to disable the GPS, it's not the kind of vehicle that you just park somewhere without somebody noticing."

"Let's hope so," Stella replied miserably. "Mac's assailant had quite a head start this morning," she added. "It took me far too long to realize that Mac was in trouble."

Don looked at her thoughtfully, his brow creased. "Mac had to be _seriously_ off his guard to be taken down like this. I was the last person to talk to him, and he sounded a little, well, distracted on the phone. He even said something about taking the day off, which is - hey! - pretty unlike him." He paused. "Anything happen between the two of you that I should know about?"

"No, Flack." She shook her head slowly, avoiding his gaze. She couldn't bear to think that she had somehow contributed to Mac's distraction. "Nothing happened between us."

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><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 3 "Angel of Mercy"<strong>

**Early Tuesday morning: Mac Taylor's point of view**

Going back to Tuesday morning, we find out exactly what happened to Mac, and where he is now.


	3. Angel of mercy

**Author's note: **Thank you very much to Lilmizmoz, tlh45, Herrera, mav32, gluegirl56 and SMACkedHuddy for your kind reviews - this chapter is for you!

_This_ is the one chapter of which the title may - or may not - be a lie. You'll know by the end of the story!

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><p><strong>Chapter 3 - "Angel of mercy"<strong>

**Mac Taylor, early Tuesday morning **

"Let's just take a shortcut."

The orderly smiled as he opened a door to a brightly-lit stairwell, bypassing the early morning crowd waiting in front of the hospital elevators.

For a few minutes, Mac Taylor followed the man through Angel of Mercy, while bantering with Don on Stella's phone. He was elated to be back on his feet again so soon after what had gone down at the bodega last night. Although still a painful reminder, the knife wound beneath his ribs wasn't as serious as he had feared at first. Instead, he had used the incident as a much-needed final push to overcome the self-doubt that always held him back when it came to Stella. Thinking back to their furtive kisses in the bathroom, he had to admit he was pretty pleased that he had finally made his move. _Why the hell hadn't they done this years ago?_

His mind was already racing ahead to the prospect of seeing Stella again, and it was quite an effort for him to stay focused on his conversation with Don. He shook his head with a grin, hoping that she was being serious and not just looking for some fun. Don had been rather startled to hear that he was planning to take the day off. He could only imagine what everyone else's reaction at the lab would be when Stella announced the same intent. Hating the complications of an office romance, he hoped they still somehow had time to come up with a plausible cover story.

As they turned yet another corner, Mac stopped for a minute to put his hand against the wall, already winded from their brisk walk.

"Are you okay?" he heard the orderly ask. "You need a wheelchair? It's actually hospital policy -"

"No, I'm fine, really," Mac interrupted, briefly placing the phone against his chest. "I don't need your help." Setting off again, Mac rubbed the dull ache under his ribs, hoping it wouldn't spoil the day Stella had planned for them.

In passing, the orderly pointed to a "no cell phones" sign, and Mac decided to wrap up the conversation with Don, slipping the phone into the pocket of his sweatpants. He looked down at his faded gray sweats and smiled. Stella had certainly sabotaged his return to the office, and once again his mind lingered on what she could possibly have in mind for the rest of the day. He'd have to cancel a couple of meetings, of course, including a particular tiresome one with Sinclair, but that would actually be a welcome relief.

When he looked up again, Mac realized that not only had he had lost sight of the orderly, but he no longer knew where he was. Frowning, he turned around to look at the empty corridor behind him. They had only been walking for ten minutes, but he hadn't been paying attention to where they were going, and now he stood alone in a seemingly deserted part of the hospital. Thinking back, he realized it had actually been a while since they had passed anyone else on their way.

The silent hallway was lined with what appeared to be broken hospital equipment. Still short of breath, Mac put his hand on an empty bed parked next to two swing doors marked "Laundry Room". Something wasn't right, he thought, looking around again. _What the hell kind of shortcut was this? They had to be miles from radiology._ Feeling uneasy, he instinctively looked up to check for surveillance cameras. Finding none, he pulled the phone out of his pocket again, debating what to do now. Since he was holding her phone in his hands, there was obviously no point in calling Stella. He stared at the phone, trying to recall if his own phone - still back in his hospital room - was switched on.

At that moment, he heard a sudden noise right behind him. Turning around, he received a crushing blow to his forehead, which sent the phone flying out of his hand and spinning across the hallway floor.

An excruciating pain exploded like a depth charge inside his head. Instinctively, he pressed both hands to his forehead, feeling the blood seep down through his fingers, soaking into the sleeves of his sweatshirt. He knew he needed his hands to defend himself from another blow, but it felt like his head would come apart if he removed them. With a gasp, he staggered backwards and stumbled through the swing doors into a dark, windowless room.

Blinded by the blood in his eyes, and deafened by the ringing in ears, he felt another fierce blow crack the ribs on his right side. Doubled over now, he took another few steps backwards and tripped over something bulky lying on the floor. He landed heavily on his back, expelling most of the air from his lungs. Struggling to inhale again, he rolled over onto his hands and knees. He tried desperately to get up, but his hands kept sliding on the bloody floor beneath him. Eventually, he slipped and landed awkwardly on his injured right side. Trying to regain control of his breathing, he lay still and listened for the whereabouts of his unseen attacker.

Mac's vision slowly adjusted to the darkness, and he saw the outline of a person backlit by the green glow of an emergency exit sign. The man was sitting motionless on the floor directly in front of him, and for a while Mac heard him still breathing heavily from the exertion. Gradually, though, the sound faded away, and now all he could hear was his own rasping breath. _Why is he just sitting there?_ _Is he deciding what to do next, or just waiting for me to die?_

"Who ... are ... you?" Mac managed to gasp, almost inaudibly.

His words were met with a long silence. _Had the man not heard him speak?_ _Was he even really there?_

"Angel of mercy," came the ominous reply.

Mac didn't consciously hear the man's words, but their underlying menace swirled around in his dazed mind. It was as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the air in the darkened room. As he felt his strength slowly seep out of him, a chill crept over him and he started to shiver.

Suddenly he felt his wrists being yanked together and bound tightly. Then a pair of hands grabbed him under his arms and dragged him backwards across the room and into the bright light, before pushing him up onto a gurney. Furious at the injustice of being injured again so soon, Mac felt a sudden surge of adrenaline pull him back from the edge of consciousness, and he started to struggle against his attacker. Blinking the blood out of his eyes, he saw a dizzying rush of bright fluorescent ceiling lights pass over his head. He kept trying to get up, but the man held something firmly down against his throbbing forehead, effectively pinning him down on the gurney. Finally, he felt his breathing ease a little as he began to teeter on the very brink of an enclosing darkness.

**Late Tuesday afternoon**

When Mac woke up again, he could tell that he was lying flat on his back on a hard floor. He groaned and kept his eyes tightly shut. _Where am I?_ The pain in his head was still overpowering, and every breath sent agonizing jolts down both his sides. His left hand seemed to be constrained, caught on something around the wrist. He stretched out his free right hand and noticed that his fingers were stuck together. _Not good_. He brought his hand up to his face and ran his fingertips across the painful welt on his forehead, counting twelve stitches. _What the hell happened? _

The last thing he could remember was walking behind the orderly through a maze of hospital hallways and stairwells. After that, only a few incoherent memories swam into focus. Frowning, he recalled bright lights shining into his eyes, and then an angry Asian face shouting at him to lie still. Who on _earth_ had that been? And then, after that, there was ... nothing, except a gaping void in his mind. There was no explanation for why he would be lying here on this floor right now.

Reluctant to open his eyes just yet, he strained to listen to his surroundings instead, but the room seemed to be silent. No voices, no footsteps, no traffic. Gradually he noticed the faint tap-tap of water dripping into a metal sink, and then a small motor began humming somewhere in the room. Next, a dog started barking furiously somewhere outside, and he was _certain_ he was not at Angel of Mercy any longer.

Finally, he opened his eyes and found himself staring up at something blurry stirring right above his head. He blinked several times, trying to get his mind to register what his eyes were seeing. After a minute or so, he realized that he was looking up at a curtain, wafting slightly in the draft from a broken window above him. Then he saw that he was lying next to a large cast-iron radiator under the window. The window itself appeared to have been crudely boarded up with plywood, and its edges cast the only rays of daylight into what was a large, unlit room.

He turned his head to his right and saw an old kitchen table and two wooden chairs close to him. Craning his neck, he looked up at the wall behind him and noted several kitchen cupboards, a metal sink, an old stove, and - at the far end - an open door leading into another room. From where he was lying, however, the angle was too shallow for him to see into the other room. The wall opposite was empty, except for a wall calendar and an old fridge in the corner. Across the brown linoleum floor from the window, there was a wide doorway leading into a dark hallway.

Turning his head back again, he noticed for the first time that his left wrist was in fact handcuffed to the radiator_. What the hell -? _He pulled several times on the handcuffs, which clanked louder than he had expected against the painted radiator pipe. Groaning again, he rolled over on his left side and ran his fingertips along the pipe, discovering small, criss-crossing scratch marks that had scraped most of the paint off. _Had he done this himself?_ he wondered, his panic rising. _How long had he been lying here already?_ He felt the linoleum floor below the pipe with his fingers but found no paint chips or scrapings, and he calmed down again. It couldn't have been him after all, he thought with relief.

He rolled onto his back and held up his arms, trying to work out what exactly had happened. He squinted as he studied the bloodstains on his sleeves and the blood caking his hands. _Was all of this really his own blood?_ He didn't seem to have any defensive wounds, so he must have been caught completely by surprise. For whatever reason, he must have had his arms raised for his attacker to get such a clean swipe at his ribs. Bracing his aching ribs with his right arm, he slowly raised one knee and looked down at the blood spatter on his sweatpants. Everything he could see was consistent with him being struck on the head while standing up, and then continuing to bleed heavily while lying on his right side. That meant that some time had passed before anyone had found him, in which case he probably hadn't been attacked in a public part of the hospital. He looked more closely at his bloody hands again and noticed a puncture wound from an IV needle. Recalling the twelve stitches on his forehead, he realized that someone must have saved his life by taking him to the ER. _In that case, _w_hy wasn't he still at the hospital? It didn't make any sense._

He remembered that he had been talking to Don on the phone as he walked through the hospital. Had Don somehow overheard what had happened? And where was that phone now? He quickly slipped his hand into the pockets of his sweatpants, but they were empty. He looked up again, recalling that there had been a slight bulge behind the curtain above him. _Was it just going to be that easy? _Expecting to find a wall-mounted kitchen phone, he reached up and flicked the curtain out from the wall with his fingertips. But it was just an old-fashioned, round electricity meter. _Damn! _Disappointed, he cursed himself for getting his hopes up in vain.

Taking another look at the empty kitchen, he suddenly had the depressing sensation that he was lying in one of the countless sordid crime scenes that he himself had investigated over the years. _These are a bad omen_, he thought, glancing at the handcuffs on his wrist again._ Someone really doesn't want me to get out of here alive._ He could almost see his team kneel down beside his own lifeless body, grimly opening their crime scene kits to process the kitchen and determine the cause of death.

He tried to shake off the gloomy feeling that had crept up on him. _What on earth was happening?_ He had looked danger in the eye often enough, but couldn't recall being afraid for his life like this. There had to be some kind of rational explanation for this. _Was it something his attacker had said to him?_ He forced himself to think even further back, and suddenly the memory of Stella swept back into his consciousness. Remembering the warm glow of their kisses, he realized how much more he stood to lose now, apart from his own life. Only minutes after promising Stella he'd be more careful, he had let her down by blundering straight into some kind of set-up. If she had been upset about what had happened at the bodega, he could only imagine how furious she had to be at him right now. _Did I really tell her to stop worrying?_ He put his hand over his eyes. How could he have been so reckless? _This is what you get for letting your guard down, Mac, _he sighed. Who would have thought his Taylor luck would run out so soon?

Mac felt the room start to spin again, and a wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm him. He didn't want to risk passing out while lying on his back, so he settled uncomfortably on his right side. It was awkward to have his handcuffed left wrist pulled back behind him, but at least this way he was facing into the empty kitchen. Whoever had brought him here from the hospital - and handcuffed him to the radiator - would be coming back through the dark doorway opposite, and Mac hoped to be ready for him. Closing his eyes, he allowed the oncoming darkness to settle over him again like a starless night sky.

* * *

><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 4 "There are no problems with our investigation"<strong>

**Late Tuesday afternoon: Don Flack's point of view**

Stella and Don continue to disagree, thereby getting their investigation into more trouble than they realize at first.


	4. No problems with our investigation

**Author's note:** A very special thanks to the following wonderful reviewers: mav32, Herrera, Lilmizmoz, AccidentalNaps, tlh45, lily moonlight, gluegirl56 and Mahala!

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 4 - "There are no problems with our investigation"<strong>

**Don Flack, late Tuesday afternoon**

"Please tell me you guys have got _something_!"

Don Flack looked up as Danny burst into the ER staff room, dumping an armful of evidence bags on the table. Stella was facing the window, finishing off a tense phone conversation with Chief Sinclair, but she turned around and nodded to her CSI colleague.

"Hawkes and I are done in the laundry room," Danny continued, "and he's off talking to Mac's doctors now." Sitting down wearily in a chair next to Don, he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "I don't _ever_ want to do anything like that again," he added grimly.

"Mac's gone down a rabbit hole, Danny," Don replied, shaking his head, "and all we've got is a whole lot of _nothing_." He flicked through his notebook. "We've got an APB out, of course, but nothing useful has come in so far. We've got no inside footage of our perp and Mac leaving the hospital. My guys have already checked all security cameras outside the hospital, including the parking garage and the city park across the street. _Nothing_. Right now, I've got some officers looking at traffic cams, taxis and buses, even checking nearby subway stations. The others are canvassing potential witnesses in and around the ER. Apparently it was pretty chaotic down there this morning, with several drunk car crash victims running around. As we speak, they're tracking down any ER staff who've been off duty since this morning, as well as cleaners, outpatients, discharged patients, visiting relatives, et cetera. So far, no one's seen anything."

Don made a big zero with his thumb and index finger before flipping his notebook shut. "If we don't come up with something really soon, I'll have to talk to Sinclair again about going to the media before the trail goes cold."

"What about that missing ambulance we heard about earlier?" Danny asked.

"A dead end," Don sighed and threw his notebook on the table. "The ambulance broke down and was towed to a garage. The driver wanted a break and didn't report it until three hours later."

Danny shook his head in disgust. "How can an ambulance be off the radar for _three hours_, and no one notices?"

"I don't like what I'm hearing about security around here, either. Stella and I have a meeting with the hospital execs in half an hour. With any luck, the head of hospital security will be there. From what I've seen so far, I'm not surprised he's keeping a low profile."

"I just told Sinclair that we want to ask for public assistance in finding witnesses," Stella interrupted, handing the cell phone back to Don. "He didn't seem thrilled by the prospect. He told us to hold back until we had exhausted all other leads. 'Only as a last resort, and only with my permission' were his exact words."

Danny frowned. "That's a bit weird, isn't it? I mean, he _does_ want us to find Mac, doesn't he?"

"C'mon, Danny, you know what he's like." Don rolled his eyes. "He's probably worried about the reputation of the NYPD. I guess he thinks we look like idiots asking the public for help in finding one of our own."

"Have _you_ got anything for us, Danny?" Stella asked.

"Well, for one thing, you can have your phone back now, Stella." Danny rummaged through the evidence bags on the table and handed one of them to her. "Mac's attacker wasn't wearing gloves. So it's no surprise Hawkes and I found his prints everywhere, but there were none on your phone. We think Mac must have dropped it in the hallway when he was attacked. And before you ask, I've already checked, the last call was incoming from you, Flack. Mac didn't get a chance to make any calls," he added grimly.

Lost in her own thoughts, Stella stared at her cell phone inside the plastic bag in her hands. Don watched her, remembering her frantic early morning phone call to him. At first, he didn't realize that she was actually serious about Mac being missing. It didn't make any sense - he had _just_ talked to Mac on the phone, and he sounded fine, in fact he sounded _more_ than fine. But it was no joke, and Don had quickly rounded up all available precinct officers before racing to the hospital.

Now Don felt the full weight of Mac's unspoken expectations on his shoulders. He always knew he owed Mac _big time_ for saving his life after Lessing's bomb, _and_ for dragging him back from the brink of self-destruction when Jess died. Some of the other homicide detectives at the precinct were envious, because Mac often put in a good word for him and always gave him full credit for his contribution to the Crime Lab's successes. In fact, once Mac had even saved his job by _lying_ to his captain, which Don knew was the _one_ thing Mac hated doing more than anything else in the world. He had always hoped this would never happen, but today the time had come for him to return the favors and prove his mettle to his friend and mentor.

Don had been at hundreds of bloody crime scenes before, but none had ever affected him the way the laundry room did earlier, and after one look, he instantly regretted having had breakfast that morning. When they had left the laundry room together, he told Stella he had to make a phone call, before rushing into the men's washroom and throwing up in the sink. Ashamed of himself, he had stared at his pale reflection in the mirror, holding on to the sink with both hands. _Good thing Mac can't see me now_, he thought, as he twirled open the faucet. _I'm behaving like a damned rookie_. He took a deep breath and scooped the cold water into his face. _I've got to pull myself together and find him before it's too late. Mac's expecting it of me._

"I've already uploaded the perp's prints to the lab," Danny continued, "but there were no hits in CODIS or any of the national databases. Right now, Adam is checking for case-to-case hits with unknown prints or partials from previous cases. And Lindsay is ready to work on a DNA profile, as soon as I get this stuff back to the lab. It's your call, Stella, how we prioritize right now." He looked expectantly at his new interim boss, as of the last few hours.

"Well, in order to do that," she answered, taking her eyes off her phone again, "we need a better idea of a possible motive. Flack and I have been discussing whether it was random or premeditated. The ER doctor told us he's seen Mac's attacker at the hospital several times earlier. We definitely need to look into that."

"Stella," Don interrupted, "I thought we agreed that Patel was lying. If he's not an actual accomplice, he's either incompetent or criminally negligent, or both."

"Watch out who you're calling incompetent," Stella replied impatiently, drumming her fingers on the table. "As you know, Patel wasn't the only one fooled by this guy."

Don frowned at her. _What on earth had been going on in their heads this morning? She and Mac definitely must have had their minds on another planet. _If Stella was feeling guilty about something, it was no reason to take it out on the rest of them. "So, Danny," he said without taking his eyes off Stella, "what do you think? Was it planned or not?"

Danny held up the heaviest evidence bag. "It looks like Mac was struck with this iron bar from a broken traction frame, which had been left lying on a hospital bed outside the laundry room. As you can see, it's been snapped right off, so it's pretty sharp and could definitely cause some serious damage." Then he showed them another, smaller bag. "The white plastic cord you saw on Mac's wrists was probably taken from this box of zip-ties used to seal laundry bags."

Stella glanced up at Don with an irritating I-told-you-so look in her eyes. "Well, this sounds like a crime of opportunity to me. A sudden attack, where our perp grabs whatever he can get his hands on. What else, Danny?"

"I don't know if I agree with you there, Stella," Danny replied, shaking his head. "This guy must have already have known about the laundry room. Sheldon found a discarded, blood-spattered orderly uniform stuffed into one of the laundry bags. We're thinking that this is where he changed into a clean paramedic uniform before taking Mac to the ER. In fact, we think it's likely he stole the orderly uniform from one of the laundry bags in the first place."

"Stella, you've _got_ to admit that this sounds planned!" Don said. "He dressed up as an orderly because he intended to lure Mac down to the laundry room."

"Yeah, but get this," Danny interrupted, "the broken hospital bed wasn't left in the corridor until seven o'clock this morning. That's only half an hour before Mac disappeared. That's pretty tight planning."

"How _can_ it be premeditated, Flack?" Stella demanded. "Mac wasn't admitted until after midnight last night, and _I'm_ the one who talked him into staying. Does that make _me_ a suspect now? I mean, how could this guy have known that Mac would be here at all?"

"Okay, maybe he just happened to recognize Mac and then decided to -" Don started.

"But I already told you that Mac didn't recognize him!" she interrupted.

"Stella! We're going in circles again, here!"

Baffled by their behavior, Danny looked helplessly back and forth between the two of them. "Hey, guys, guys!" he finally shouted, raising his hands to make a time-out sign. "Can we just forget the question of motive for a second, okay? Now, we know for a fact that our perp is a lunatic in a hospital uniform, who seems to know his way around the place. So I'd say that we're looking for either a present or former patient, or ditto staff member. If the two of you will _agree _with me," he paused, waiting for them to stop staring at each other, "I'll get an officer to help me check staff and patient files right away."

Still frowning, Don nodded, while Stella said, "Okay, Danny, that sounds reasonable, go ahead. Get another of Flack's officers to drop these bags off at the lab for you."

Just as Danny was about to leave, Sheldon came into the ER staff room.

"Hey, Hawkes," Don said, "what did Mac's doctors have to say for themselves? Did Patel's story sound like hokum to you, too?"

"As you already know, I've worked in an ER before. You come across people from all walks of life, and I've even treated handcuffed patients myself. Everything about Patel's account sounds very credible to me." Sheldon noticed Stella and Don exchange hostile looks. He glanced over to Danny for an explanation, but the CSI just crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.

"Fine, that settles it," Stella said quickly, "we're dropping Patel as a suspect. Let's move on. Tell us how much time you think Mac has got, Sheldon."

"I've talked to his doctors and read his medical files," Sheldon replied, "but without a CT scan, we really don't have a complete picture of his injuries."

"So, what's the worst case scenario, then?" Don asked impatiently.

"Well, head injuries are notoriously tricky," Sheldon answered, crossing his arms defensively, "so I guess the worst case scenario is that Mac is already dead."

There was a stunned silence in the room. "You _sure_ do have a way with words, doc," Danny commented dryly, shaking his head.

"Hey, I'm a doctor! You guys asked for my professional opinion, so I gave it to you."

"Okay, but we _have_ to work on the assumption that Mac's still alive," Stella said. "How much time have we got to find him?"

"The knife wound and the broken ribs will make breathing painful for him, but they're not necessarily life-threatening injuries. The main problem is going to be his head wound. Taking Mac to the ER at that point definitely saved his life, or he would have bled out. Depending on the severity of his concussion, I'd give him 24 hours before he needs urgent medical attention. Less, of course, if he also has a skull fracture. But more if it's only a mild concussion, in which case he might even recover without any medical treatment."

"So what are his symptoms going to be?" Don asked.

"Apart from all the usual signs of a concussion, the trauma and blood loss will probably leave him feeling weak and disoriented. He'll probably know himself within the next 12 hours if he's getting better or worse."

The four of them fell silent again, their eyes on the pile of evidence bags still spread out on the table. Don picked up the sketch of the medic and studied it closely once again. _Maybe this isn't really happening, _he thought_. Maybe Mac isn't really gone, and this is just some kind of nightmare. Any minute now, I'm going to wake up late for work, and Mac's going to chew me out for oversleeping. And I'd gladly take that any day over what's happening right now._

"Of course," Sheldon continued, "this is assuming that Mac's stitches stay intact, that he stays hydrated and gets plenty of oxygen, and that he avoids infections and any unnecessary movement. Basically, he needs plenty of rest from now on." He noticed Danny staring open-mouthed at him. "_Now_ what?" he demanded.

"Well, no problem there, then, if Mac's been kidnapped by the owner of a _health spa_!" Danny blurted out, putting both hands on his head in exasperation. "C'mon, doc, this is _Mac_ we're talking about! Do you have _any_ idea how unlikely that is? The chances of him just sitting around waiting for us to find him are - like - _zero_!"

Don ran his fingers furiously through his hair. "You're right, Danny! If Mac can't think straight, his instinct will kick in, and he's going to try to fight this guy. In fact, he'll do that even if he _can_ think straight. I mean, Mac was fighting him while having his _head stitched_ in the ER!"

"Yeah, Mac would definitely have to be out cold to stay still for any length of time," Danny added glumly.

"Not exactly the kind of rest I had in mind for him," Stella muttered, her shoulders sagging.

Don glanced over at Stella once again. It wasn't like her to be so sullen and tense. Despite her denial, he knew something _definitely_ had happened between her and Mac this morning. Had they been arguing when he called? They were two of the most stubborn people he knew, and right now she was acting like she was feeling guilty about something. Danny had already told him how furious she had been last night, when they first heard that Mac had been admitted to hospital. Maybe she had really laid into him this morning? Don knew Stella could get to Mac like no one else could. Maybe it had taken a really serious falling out for him to have agreed to stay overnight. _And if she hadn't insisted that Mac stay_, Don thought with a sigh, _we wouldn't be looking for him right now_. Even if she was unfairly blaming herself for what had happened, Mac would still want him to make sure it didn't interfere with her professional judgment.

"Anything else, Sheldon?" Stella asked, pointing to her watch. "Flack and I are going to be late for our meeting with the hospital director."

"Oh, I almost forgot!" Sheldon exclaimed. "I might have an ID on our suspect. I found a half-empty bottle of ulcer pills in one of the pockets of the orderly uniform. The fingerprints on it match those we found on the weapon. They were prescribed to a Carl Dubsky, currently a resident of the psychiatric ward."

"We had been told that there were no psychiatric patients unaccounted for," Stella said, looking skeptical, "but go find out if he's missing from the ward, anyway, Hawkes. In the meantime, Danny, you get started on those patient and staff files. I'll catch up with you two back at the lab later. Tell everyone there that every other case goes to the bottom of the pile until we've found Mac!"

The four of them left the ER staff room together, and Don and Stella walked down the hall towards the elevators in an awkward silence. They were waiting for the elevator when Don's cell phone suddenly rang. With Stella's anxious eyes on his face, he listened to the report from a breathless precinct officer.

"A car has just been reported stolen from an alley outside one of the deactivated fire exits," he told her, after hanging up. "The time frame fits with when our perp left the ER with Mac. Apparently, the car owner's wife' went into labor early this morning, but he couldn't find a space in the parking garage. So he dumped his car in the alley instead, forgetting all about the keys in the ignition. In the meantime, his wife has delivered healthy twins, so our happy dad goes down to get the cigars, and only just now notices that his car is missing. There's already a BOLO out with the description and license plate number."

"Good, Flack," she said. "That sounds promising, even if this means he has head start of -" she checked her watch, "- up to seven hours. This fits with what I've been saying. Our suspect is relying on whatever he happens to find along the way."

_Not this again_, Don groaned inwardly. "We've got to be singing from the same hymn sheet here, Stella," he reminded her, as they entered the elevator.

"Well, we are, aren't we?" she huffed, pressing the button for the top floor. "You just concentrate on finding that car. If you come up empty, then get Sinclair to authorize that media appeal. We need to get my sketch of our suspect out there."

"Okay, as long as you go back to the lab and go through Mac's old cases. I'm still convinced that this somehow is connected to Mac being a cop. I mean, this guy somehow got Mac out of the hospital unseen. This _must_ have been planned - no one gets to be _that_ lucky!"

"Fine, whatever," Stella replied, rolling her eyes. "I'll search the case files as soon as I'm done lending a hand processing the evidence from the laundry room."

"I wouldn't do that, Stella," Don warned, placing his hand on her wrist. "If Danny, Lindsay or the others need any help, get someone else to step in."

Stella turned around to face him, confused. "What on earth do you mean?"

Don shook his head and sighed. _Was he really going to have to spell it out for her?_ "As you saw yourself, the security camera footage is useless as potential evidence, because Mac is unrecognizable on it. So right now you and Patel are our only witnesses who can testify that it was this guy who abducted Mac. And, as you know, I don't buy the good doctor's story. I just don't want anyone claiming our case is compromised because our only witness processed the evidence herself."

"But the trace evidence is overwhelming in itself," Stella answered, the anger in her voice rising another notch. "This guy's fingerprints and DNA is on everything, including the weapon. A case would never depend on _my_ witness testimony."

"And that's exactly why I need you to stay out of the chain of custody, Stella. Just let the rest of the team process the stuff from the laundry room. You can still supervise and prioritize their work. You'll be plenty busy, anyway, running the lab in Mac's absence."

"But I would _never_ interfere with the evidence, Flack." She fixed her eyes on his in an angry stare.

"Of course, I know that, Stella!" _Why was she being so touchy?_ "But it's happened before," he couldn't help adding, "and I don't want anyone even _thinking_ that it could happen again." He could tell from the way her jaw dropped that she knew exactly who he was thinking of.

"I just can't believe that _you_ of all people are bringing this up! Everyone knows the New York Crime Lab has an impeccable reputation."

"Hey, I know that, too, and I know we have Mac to thank for that! I only wish I could say the same thing for the rest of New York's finest."

The elevator came to a halt, and they stepped out into the foyer of the top floor. "Flack, is this your way of telling me that I can't run the Crime Lab as professionally as Mac?"

"No, Stella, not at all!" He was exasperated. _How difficult was it to understand?_ "I'm just saying that the lab doesn't deal with anything like every day. The big boss is missing, and if I'm right, the answer is somewhere inside your own Crime Lab. I just don't want this guy's lawyers claiming that our investigation has been compromised, even if it hasn't, that's all."

"His lawyers? Listen to you, Flack!" she shouted. "We haven't even caught the guy yet, and you've already got him lawyered up!"

"Hey, we're talking about the abduction of a senior detective from a public hospital in broad daylight. Even here in New York City, this'll make a few headlines, and some ambulance chaser will take the case pro-bono, just for the publicity. And then he's going to try to get Mac's attacker off with some psychobabble about his father beating him as a child. Believe me, I've seen it before. Our case has to be absolutely watertight."

"But right now I couldn't care less about building a case or going to trial! I don't even really care if this guy is ever convicted. I just want to do what I can to find Mac before it's too late, even if it means processing the evidence myself. Is that _really_ so hard to understand?"

"Stella, you _can't_ think like that! It's not how Mac would handle it, and you know it. You need to be level-headed about this and do everything by the book, just as you would with any other case."

"Oh?" She arched an eyebrow. "And where in the book of level-headedness does it say anything about browbeating our only other witness, I wonder?"

"You mean Dr. Pinocchio? C'mon, we both know that guy was lying through his teeth. He was so close to coming clean if you hadn't stopped the interview."

"Ahem?" They heard someone clearing his throat behind them. "Was that a racial slur against one of our doctors we just heard, detectives?"

Don and Stella spun around to find five men in suits standing right around the corner from the elevators. Judging from the frowns on their faces, they had overheard every word they had said. _Oh shit! Please tell me that didn't just happen._ Don tried desperately to recall exactly at what point in their argument they had stepped out of the elevator. _Erase and rewind._

"You were running a little late," the most senior-looking of the men explained, "so we decided to come and meet you here in the lobby." Then he introduced himself as the hospital executive director, before introducing the vice-director and head of security, standing on either side of him. Pointing to the last two men, he added, "Just as a formality, we've also brought our legal representation. May I suggest we all proceed to my office, detectives?"

Don put on a formal smile and extended his hand to greet each of the five men in turn. _Two lawyers?_ _They're already closing ranks, _he thought. _We're opening a can of worms here, and they know it_.

"Guess who _else_ just lawyered up!" Stella hissed to him under her breath, as they followed the men across the plush carpeting.

"Ain't that just a kick in the head?" he whispered back, entering the director's office with her.

"Detectives Flack and Bonasera," the director said, closing the door behind them, "does there seem to be a problem with your investigation?"

"Oh, no, not at all," Don replied suavely. "Despite what you think you just heard, there are no problems with our investigation."

* * *

><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 5 "I don't remember my name"<strong>

**Tuesday evening: Mac Taylor's point of view**

Mac finally meets his abductor and learns why he was attacked, leading him to make a crucial decision about how to deal with his situation.


	5. I don't remember my name

**Author's note: **Thank you to everyone who is still with me so far - and especially many thanks to my faithful reviewers!

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 5 - "I don't remember my name"<strong>

**Mac Taylor, Tuesday evening**

Even before opening his eyes, Mac Taylor woke up to the realization that he was still lying on the kitchen floor. He could hear the old refrigerator humming and the kitchen faucet dripping, and he recognized the cool draft from the broken window on the back of his neck. He even remembered the reason why his left hand was stretched out behind him. This time, though, he could sense that he was no longer alone in the room.

With a groan, he rolled over onto his back to take the weight off his aching ribs. _If I somehow could get by without breathing, this would be so much more bearable_, he thought. Even lying down with his eyes closed, he felt strangely dizzy, and the slightest movement caused his heart to pound in his ears. Adding this to the ever-present headache, this only confirmed that he had some kind of concussion.

Finally, he blinked a few times to clear his blurry vision, before putting his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare of the ceiling light bulb. First he noticed a jacket hanging on the back of the kitchen chair closest to him. Then he saw that someone had turned the other chair around and was sitting with his elbows resting on the chair's back. The man held a beer bottle from which he took a long sip, without taking his eyes off Mac lying by his feet.

When Mac recognized the hospital orderly, he felt his adrenaline surge instinctively, and his temper urged him to kick the chair out from under the man. But as long as he was still handcuffed to the radiator that would probably be suicidal, he reminded himself. Clenching his fists, he took a deep breath to speak, but a searing pain on his right side made him cough painfully. He gasped as he struggled to inhale again, sweat breaking out on his brow as his panic rose.

The man took another slow sip, while he watched Mac fight for air. "Hey, take shallow breaths," he finally said. "You've got a couple of broken ribs there."

Mac managed to relax his breathing a bit, but was still unable to speak above a whisper. "What am I doing here?"

His question was met with a long silent stare, making Mac wonder if the man was ever going to speak again. "Someone told me you needed an angel to take care of you," he finally said.

Mac put his hand over his eyes, his mind struggling to comprehend what he had just heard. It was a truly extraordinary thing to say. But even more strange, the man's answer hadn't been entirely unexpected, as if they had already spoken about angels before. _How was that even possible?_ The gaping hole in his memory worried him, and he resented his obvious disadvantages in the presence of this man. He decided to take things slowly, at least until he regained his bearings, and had worked out what was going on_. _

"And what," Mac growled, finally finding his voice again, "are you telling me that you're an angel?"

"Well, it certainly would explain a lot of things," the man answered thoughtfully and took another sip of his beer. "Like the voices I hear. Because that's what angels do, they hear voices." He smiled warmly at Mac. "I'm Vince, and I'm here to help you. You can think of me as your own personal angel of mercy."

Mac's eyes widened as he stared at the man. _More like my own personal angel of death_. Vince was clearly delusional, maybe even clinically schizophrenic. He would have to consider his words carefully.

"Has it occurred to you, Vince, that maybe I don't want your help?" he replied. He placed his hand over his eyes again, trying to rub the dizziness from them. _Christ, this couldn't really be happening._ _Maybe he was hallucinating?_

"It doesn't look like you have a choice, does it now?"

His hand still clamped over his eyes, Mac lifted a few fingers to glance up at the man drinking his beer again."Well, exactly _how_ are you helping me here, then?" He rattled the handcuffs around his left wrist to make his point. "I have a concussion, and I need to get back to the hospital - back to the _real_ Angel of Mercy." _By any standard, this had to be a pretty broad interpretation of taking care of someone._

"No, _I'm_ the real angel of mercy!" Mac recognized both anger and frustration in Vince's voice. "Someone attacked you at that hospital and left you for dead, don't you remember?"

Mac opened and closed his mouth wordlessly. Even without the concussion, this unpredictable conversation would easily have set his head spinning. Now he had to take yet another moment to think. _What the hell was going on? Was his head injury keeping him from seeing something blindingly obvious?_ Although he couldn't recall exactly what had happened, he was almost certain that this was the man who had attacked him. Did Vince really believe his own story, or was he just messing with him?

Mac decided to fall back on his instinct as a cop, getting people to tell him as much information as possible without volunteering anything himself. "No, I don't remember anything, it's all just a blur," he replied. "You don't _really_ work at the hospital, do you, Vince?" he added, his mind racing furiously again. _What on earth was the connection between them?_

"No, I don't." The man gave him a thin smile. "But you're lucky I happened come across you when I did."

"Hm, yes," Mac replied wearily, raising an eyebrow. "Amazingly, you were first on scene. No wonder you thought it had to be divine intervention."

"So I decided to bring you back to my house, where you'll be safe."

Mac raised his arms and took another look at his blood-spattered sweatshirt sleeves. Not exactly inconspicuous, he looked as if he had wandered off the set of a horror movie. _How on earth did they leave the hospital with him looking like this?_

"But how exactly did we get here, Vince?" Mac desperately needed to find out what chance Don and Stella had of tracing his whereabouts. There had to be dozens of security cameras and traffic cams around Angel of Mercy that would have shown them leaving the hospital.

"Oh, you'll never guess, " the man laughed. "But don't worry, no one will _ever_ find you here. All the windows are nailed shut, and I've got four locks on the front door. Even the neighbors don't know you're here. The house on this side has been empty since foreclosing sometime last year, and the one on that side is a crack house now."

"The police will probably be looking for me."

"Well, I'm ready for them." Vince suddenly held a gun in his hand. "This is how I'll talk to the cops."

Mac's mind reeled. _Sweet Jesus, he's got a gun._ He blamed his dazed mind for not having expected this. If Vince had brought the gun with him to the hospital, they certainly wouldn't be having this mind-boggling conversation right now. Mac took as deep a breath as he could without coughing again. This just lengthened the odds of his escaping considerably. _Where did that gun suddenly come from?_ As far as he could tell, Vince wasn't wearing a holster, and his jacket was hanging on the other kitchen chair. So either the gun had been lying up on the tabletop, or Vince kept it tucked into his belt behind his back.

It took a few seconds before Mac recognized the real significance of what Vince had just said. _Vince doesn't know I'm a cop._ So it had been the right decision after all to weigh his words carefully. Stella would definitely have approved. It also meant that this _couldn't_ be about him personally, and it certainly had nothing to do with the bodega robbery. He hadn't blundered into some kind of set-up after all, and he hoped that Don and the CSI team would work this out quickly.

Mac made a quick decision and reached out for the gun with his free hand. "Is it loaded? Can I see it?" It was worth a try, but Vince's smile froze, and the gun disappeared too fast for Mac to see where it went. _Vince doesn't trust me. This is obviously not the way forward. _"Okay," he sighed, "let's just say that I'm safe here in your house. But why am I handcuffed to your radiator?"

"I don't think I can trust you," Vince replied, looking deeply offended. "Something about you makes me think you could be dangerous."

"How could I _possibly_ be dangerous to you?" Mac tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. If Vince kept the handcuff keys in his pocket, there was no way he could get at them with only one hand free. His best option was still somehow to get at the gun.

"I don't know how, but I can see it in your eyes."

Groaning again, Mac rolled over on his right side and got up on his elbow. _Damn,_ _I can't reach him from here._ "C'mon, that can't be true, Vince. I can't even focus my eyes properly."

"If you try to attack me, I _will_ shoot you!"

_You probably will_. With considerable effort, Mac managed to push himself up off the floor and sit up with his back against the radiator. It wasn't a very comfortable position, but at least now his eyes were level with the tabletop. _No gun._ So Vince must have it in the back of his belt. If only he could get Vince to move closer, then maybe he could somehow reach around his waist and grab it. He would have to be very swift, though, which wasn't going to be easy with the concussion.

"What are you thinking?" Vince sounded suspicious.

"I was just thinking that I really need to get my head examined. Literally," he added, in case he was being too subtle. _And so do you, Vince._

"You _just_ don't get it, do you?" Vince exploded in a sudden rage. "I keep telling you, it's too dangerous for you to go back to the hospital. You almost got yourself killed there. You're lucky I found you and brought you here."

"No, _you're_ the one who doesn't get it!" Mac shouted back, instantly regretting it, as a sudden surge of pain in his ribs and head nearly took his breath away. He paused to take a few shallow breaths before continuing in a calmer voice. "I can't stay here in your house, Vince." He stared at the man, who looked genuinely confused. "I know you _think_ you can help me, but you can't. You do realize I need _real_ medical help, don't you?"

Frowning, Vince stood up and stomped out through the door leading into the adjacent room.

_Now what?_ Mac's eyes wandered over to the empty kitchen counters, trying to guess what Vince kept in his cupboards and drawers. He was sure he only needed a five-second head start to whatever drawer the kitchen knives were in. He rubbed his eyes again, his head still spinning from arguing with Vince. _Well, maybe 10 seconds._

Over the years, Mac had been called out to enough homicides and accidental deaths to know that the kitchen was the most dangerous room of the house. He had seen everything from sharp force injuries with kitchen knives, blunt force trauma with pots and pans, and strangulation with electric cords, to less ordinary occurrences involving boiling liquids, corkscrews and ice cubes. If only he could get out of these handcuffs, Mac was certain he could easily get his hands on a half a dozen items on his very long list of potential household weapons.

Then Vince returned carrying a large transparent plastic bag full of pill bottles, jars and boxes, which he set down heavily on the kitchen table.

Mac's jaw dropped open. There had to be at least a hundred different kinds of medication inside the bag. "_That's_ your prescription medication, Vince?" he asked incredulously. His luck had _definitely_ turned if he was being held by the most highly medicated psychiatric patient in New York City.

"No, you idiot, I've been off my own meds for _years_. They kind of took the edge off, you know? The voices just faded away." Vince smiled. "This stuff I just take from the hospital. I guess you can say that I'm self-medicated now."

Mac couldn't think of anything to say. It sounded like an absolutely insane thing to do. "Any of it painkillers?" Maybe without his ever-present splitting headache, he would finally be able to think more clearly, and work out what to do.

"Have a look for yourself." Vince dumped the plastic bag into Mac's lap.

Under Vince's watchful gaze, Mac rummaged through the bag, holding up the various bottles, jars, boxes, vials and blister packs that Vince had stolen from Angel of Mercy. _No syringes_, Mac noted, unsure whether he should be relieved or disappointed. Squinting to read the small print on the labels, he recognized some commonly prescribed drugs for diabetes, heart disease and depression, but much of the medication was rather obscure. And if _he_ didn't recognize it, he was sure Vince had absolutely _no idea_ what he was taking. Several packages had patient names on them with dates going back two-three years, but none had Vince's own name. Mac recognized prescription medication for various psychiatric disorders as well, but as far as he could tell, there was nothing here to _cause_ Vince to become delusional. On the other hand, there was nothing to _prevent_ him from having psychotic episodes, either.

Mac frowned as he reflected on his own situation. _This was not good news._ This stuff ought to be very hard to get a hold of, especially the psychiatric medication. It didn't look promising at all for state of security at Angel of Mercy. If Vince had been stealing drugs regularly for at least three years, then the hospital should have filed a dozen police reports, in which case he really should have been caught by now. Mac suspected that the hospital had decided not to do so, in order to avoid drawing attention to their substandard security and thereby risking litigation. This, in turn, probably meant that they wouldn't be highly motivated to collaborate with the NYPD investigation into his own disappearance. And that would present a considerable challenge for Stella and Don in their search for him.

He picked up an unopened bottle of antibiotics and blinked for a second, when he recognized his own name on the label. Feeling Vince's eyes burning into him, he quickly tossed the bottle back into the bag. At least now he knew what Vince was doing in his hospital room that morning. He hadn't come for Mac at all - but his _medication_ - when he overheard Stella and him talking in the bathroom. _That was the connection._ In fact, if Mac hadn't brought the painkillers with him into the bathroom, they'd probably be here in the bag now. He sighed. Hopefully, the CSI team would be quick understand the significance of the missing pills, as well.

"How do you get away with taking all of this stuff?" Mac asked casually. He was tempted to slip a bottle into his pocket, but Vince was still watching him too closely. "What's your secret?"

"I'm invincible," Vince replied, "and invisible."

Mac rolled his eyes and groaned inwardly. _Not this crazy talk again._ He found it really unnerving, and he didn't think his head could cope with this for much longer. Looking up, he tried to read the man's expression. _Was he serious?_ "I hope you don't mean that literally, Vince, because I can actually _see_ you right now."

"No, you idiot, what I mean is that I get around without anyone noticing me. It's my special gift. I've been coming and going as I like at the hospital for years. I tell people what I think they want to hear, and they trust me instinctively."

_Don't I know it_, Mac thought bitterly, remembering their long walk through the hospital together. "But you're not exactly telling me what I want to hear right now."

"It doesn't matter any longer. I've got you where I want you now, don't I?" was the ominous reply.

Mac paused and glanced up again at the man quietly sipping his beer in front of him. Those were remarkably lucid words for someone who had just claimed to be an angel. He still needed to get more information from Vince, but he reminded himself to be careful not to underestimate him.

"Do you make a habit of abducting patients from the hospital, Vince?" he asked, still picking his way through the bottles in the bag.

"Now, why on _earth_ would I do that?" Vince was clearly offended by his question. "I didn't realize that I was an angel until today."

_Well, that makes two of us_, Mac thought, keeping his mouth shut. By now he was certain he had looked at all of the medication in the bag. Apart from his own antibiotics, there was nothing else useful to him. He _could_ ask for his own bottle of pills and risk Vince getting suspicious, or maybe he could find an alternative use for some of the _other_ pills instead.

Randomly taking other people's medication was a form of Russian roulette that would definitely kill Vince sooner or later. But Mac knew he didn't have the time to wait, and would therefore have to speed things up himself. If he at the same time could persuade Vince to go back to the hospital again, then maybe he could give Stella and Don a better chance of finding him. He dug back into the bag and located the best candidate for his plan. The bottle of heart medication had been prescribed to a Gretchen Myers two weeks earlier and was now nearly empty.

"This is _exactly_ what I need," he announced to Vince. "But unfortunately, there aren't many pills left, so I'll have to go back to the hospital for more, once this bottle is empty."

"No way." Vince shook his head. "You can't go back there, you'll be killed."

_I'll die if I stay here with you, you idiot._ "Well, _you're_ the one who is invisible. You'll just have to go for me."

"Oh, I can't go back there so soon, either. They'll be looking for both of us."

"But I thought you said you had a special gift?" Mac taunted him. "You've been getting away with this for years. Surely, you won't get caught _now_?"

Vince grabbed the bottle from Mac's hand and studied the label for a few seconds. "I've never tried these myself. But, all right, I'll go back for this lady's replacement pills, once this bottle is empty." He unscrewed the lid, counted out the six remaining pills, and handed one to Mac.

Mac took the tiny pill and held it between his thumb and index finger. It was powerful stuff, and he definitely didn't want to swallow it. "Great, in that case, I'd better take a double dose."

"Hm, I don't know about that." Vince was reading the label skeptically. "Gretchen is only supposed to take half a pill, twice a day. I never exceed the prescribed dosage myself."

"Well, just maybe I'm in a greater hurry to get well than Gretchen is."

Vince thought for a moment and shrugged. "It's your funeral." Getting up, he retrieved the bag from Mac's lap and put it back on the table. Then he took a glass from one of the cupboards and filled it with water from the tap. He handed Mac a second pill before tucking the bottle into his shirt pocket.

With a sweep of his hand, Mac pretended to drop the two pills into his mouth, while actually letting them roll down into the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Then he quickly drained the glass of water, before Vince pulled it out of his hand and put it on the table.

"Are you a patient at the hospital yourself, Vince?" Mac asked. "Or maybe a former patient?"

"Oh no, you've _got_ to be kidding me! That place is a death trap for patients. Just look what happened to you."

Scrutinizing Vince's face again, Mac concluded that he was probably telling the truth. _Damn_. He knew the CSIs would waste valuable time going through staff and patient files, because he would have done so himself. And with this concussion he really didn't know how much longer he could afford to wait for them.

"How do you get around the hospital then?" he asked. "Don't you need an ID or something?"

Vince leaned over the kitchen table to retrieve something from the pocket of the jacket on the other chair. "What do you think?" He flicked the hospital ID to Mac. "I found it still attached to a uniform in a bag of dirty laundry."

Mac held up the ID to take a closer look. He hadn't realized that this type of old-fashioned ID was still in use anywhere in the city, let alone at a public hospital. He immediately recognized the main problem - it didn't have an embedded chip that could be deactivated electronically. With his fingertips he could feel the razor cut where Vince had inserted his own photo. He had even used ordinary Scotch Tape to seal the gap.

_Christ Almighty!_ Mac sighed inwardly. If security at Angel of Mercy really was this abysmal, what chance would his team have of _ever_ finding him? His outlook suddenly seemed to be getting more and more hopeless by the minute.

"Well, that's really _some_ gift you have there, Vince," Mac said, handing back the ID. "You don't even _remotely_ look like a Sammy Choi."

"I told you so," Vince chuckled, obviously pleased with himself. "I'm invisible and in-vince-ible."

Mac glanced up at Vince with murder in his eyes_._ _I swear, if he says that one more time, I'm going after him, gun or nor gun! _This was _never_ going to work out, he told himself. He was wasting his time getting absolutely _nowhere_ with Vince. Stella and Don had better hurry up and find him very soon, because he wasn't sure he was able to control his temper for much longer.

"By the way, you haven't told me _your_ name yet," Vince added casually, before tipping the last drops of beer into his mouth.

_You already know my name, you son-of-a-bitch! _Clenching his fists to restrain his rage, Mac glowered at the man. _It was the very first words you said to me at the hospital. _He wondered what kind of damage he could do if he kicked Vince in the knees. Would he be able to get at the gun?Or would he just succeed in knocking the chair backwards, thereby putting both Vince and the gun out of his reach. Maybe if he aimed his kick lower, at the very bottom of the chair legs, he could actually tip Vince forwards instead, the way he was seated on the chair. Either way, it was going to be a very risky move as long as he still was handcuffed to the radiator.

Mac knew that the time had come for a decision. He could either keep up this charade, or he could give in to his lower instincts and lash out at Vince, whatever the odds. His head pounded as he reconsidered the two options open to him. _C'mon, play it smart, Mac._ Pretending to search his memory, he finally shook his head. "I don't remember my name."

* * *

><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 6 "We've got the Chief's full support"<strong>

**Late Tuesday night: Stella Bonasera's point of view**

At the end of the day, Stella and Don compare notes and discuss two new possible leads in their investigation into Mac's disappearance.


	6. We've got the Chief's full support

**Author's note: **Thank you everyone for tuning in once again! And a special thanks to my wonderfully psychic reviewers - you all know who you are.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 6 - "We've got the Chief's full support"<strong>

**Stella Bonasera, late Tuesday night**

Stella Bonasera sat on her bed, hugging her knees and looking at the old case files that she had spread out on the bedcover. She caught herself stifling yet another yawn. The day had been mercilessly long, but she was unwilling to let her exhaustion get the best of her. She owed it to Mac not to slow down, especially since the team still hadn't found any real leads to his whereabouts yet. Glancing up, she watched the curtain beside her open bedroom window stirring in the night breeze, and tried to imagine where he could be right now. _Oh please, let him be all right. _

Once again, her mind returned to the bittersweet memory of their kisses early that morning. It seemed like a century ago now, but every detail was still so vivid to her. Closing her eyes briefly, she could feel how his hand had raised her chin, until she was staring straight into his blue-green eyes as he kissed her. The effect had startled her, and it suddenly felt like every event in their many years of friendship had somehow clicked into place as a prelude to this very moment.

Stella picked up her cell phone and ran her fingernails along its keys, trying to remove the last of Danny's fingerprint powder. Since Mac had had the phone in his hands when he was attacked, she was even more determined to keep it close to her at all times. Any news about him - good or bad - would most likely reach her by this phone. When she had handed it to him at the hospital, their hands had briefly touched one last time. She recalled how he had glanced back at her and smiled, unwittingly already standing shoulder to shoulder with the devil. _You should make the most of the moments with the people you care about_, he once had told her.

After a tense and unpleasant meeting with the hospital management, she and Don had finally pulled themselves together and parted on more amicable terms. She promised him to stay clear of the evidence back at the Crime Lab and focus on going through Mac's previous cases instead. And he had assured her he would stop by Sinclair's office to push for a public media appeal, before heading back to the precinct to check up on every possible lead there.

Stella had started her search by comparing the sketch of their suspect with all existing photos in the Crime Lab databases, just to double-check that the others hadn't missed anything. _Nothing_. She had only seen him so very briefly. Had she somehow been mistaken about his features? So she tried several variations on his physical description. _Still nothing._ Then she pulled up the dozens of cases in which specific threats against Mac had been recorded in the case files, most often not even by Mac himself. From memory, she added another handful of unrecorded threats that she had witnessed, but drew another blank. Next, she decided to widen her search to include the many cases in which Mac had given decisive court evidence leading to a homicide or manslaughter conviction. She expanded this search to other violent crimes, getting a dizzying number of results. _Again nothing._ Then she tried Mac's arrests, but this yielded too many hits to be meaningful. She diligently cross-referenced all of Mac's cases involving violent crimes with all known perps with a history of mental illness. _Still nothing._ A search of Mac's cases somehow connected to hospitals yielded only a few unpromising hits for Angel of Mercy. For several hours, her hands flew across her computer keyboard or scribbled notes to keep track of the many names and other possible clues. Trying desperately to uncover the connection that Flack was so sure had to be there, she found nothing instead_._

Apart from a persistent headache, Stella's search had also left her overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases that Mac had in some way been involved in over the years. Even now, sitting on her bed, the many images of lifeless victims, cruel injuries, unrepentant perps and depressing crime scenes still assaulted her mind, reminding her of the anger, jealousy, greed, stupidity and plain evil they both saw in this city every day. Her heavy heart ached at the thought that they now formally had opened a case on Mac himself. He belonged in that empty chair in his office down the hall, not in the files they locked away in their desk drawers at the end of each day.

When she had left the Crime Lab just after midnight, Stella had grabbed a handful of files, mostly so that she wouldn't be going home entirely empty-handed. She had called a short meeting to update everyone, before sending most of the CSI staff home to get some rest before the morning. To everyone's disappointment, the evidence from laundry room had not revealed anything useful about the identity of Mac's attacker. Danny had spent an equally frustrating and fruitless evening back at the hospital. After involving the NYPD Legal Bureau to cut through the red tape, he had finally been granted access to the hospital's staff files and patient records. "Do you have _any_ idea what the staff turnover rate is over here?" he had complained miserably when she had called him. And Sheldon's visit to the psychiatric ward had only confirmed that they had to dismiss Carl Dubsky as a possible suspect. However, the former M.E. had still come up with their only halfway promising theory on a possible motive so far.

"I'm sorry, Stella. You were right," Sheldon had conceded as he entered her office upon returning from the hospital. "Carl Dubsky is not our man, after all."

"Are you sure?" She had looked up, bleary-eyed from staring at her computer screen. "Believe me, this guy is pretty good at pretending to be someone else."

"Well, I still doubt he could disguise himself as a short, fat, balding African-American. And, before you ask, yes, I even fingerprinted this guy to make sure. It _really_ isn't the same man."

He had sat down across from her, and Stella could tell there was more on his mind.

"But this got me wondering, Stella," he had said. "What were our suspect's prints doing on Dubsky's medication? So I managed to track down the orderly whose uniform it was in the first place. It's not possible that the pill bottle was already lying in the pocket when our suspect found the uniform in the laundry room. That means he put the bottle in the pocket himself."

Stella had nodded thoughtfully. "So we need to ask ourselves what he was doing with someone else's medication in the first place."

"Exactly! Then I remembered Stratton mentioning that he had prescribed _both_ painkillers _and_ antibiotics for Mac. Now, I found the bottle of painkillers in Mac's bathroom, but I couldn't find the antibiotics anywhere. Do you remember seeing them? Could Mac have taken the bottle with him when he left?"

"Well, I wasn't really paying attention, Sheldon," she had answered truthfully, "but I don't really see why he would. He was expecting to come straight back."

"You also told me the guy said Mac's name when you first met him."

Stella had nodded, wondering where this was leading.

"There was nothing in Mac's room with his name on it, _except_ his missing antibiotics," Sheldon had explained. "Do you realize what this could mean, Stella? I think our suspect has been stealing patients' medication, and that he left one bottle behind in the orderly uniform by mistake, when he changed into the paramedic uniform."

"In that case, this could _finally_ be the motive we've been looking for." Stella had shared his excitement. "If this guy really was snooping around Mac's room looking for medication, then this can't _possibly_ be personal. In that case, it has _nothing_ to do with Mac being a cop."

"This also fits with Patel having seen this guy on several previous occasions at the hospital. And why he already knew about the uniforms in the laundry room."

"But damn it, Sheldon," Stella had sighed, "I can't give up this search just yet. There's still so much it doesn't explain. Like why he didn't just _settle_ for stealing Mac's antibiotics. Why did he even suggest taking Mac to radiology and then attack him on the way? It's still something of a leap from stealing medication to assaulting people. Maybe Mac discovered that this guy had his pills in his pocket and confronted him about it?"

Back in her apartment now, Stella picked up another case file from her bed and glanced wearily at the alarm clock on her night table. 2:22 a.m. At that moment, her cell phone suddenly rang. _Oh my God,_ g_ood news or bad news? _

"Hi Stella," Don said, sounding a little formal and awkward. "I'm really sorry to have to wake you at this hour."

She froze, not liking the sound of this at all. "That's okay, Flack, I'm still working here. What's up?"

"We've got two possible leads on Mac's whereabouts. One is a little less ... promising than the other."

Stella realized she was holding her breath and exhaled. "Okay, just give me the bad news first."

"I just got a call from our colleagues over in the Garden State. The car stolen from the alley outside the hospital has just been found wrapped around a concrete pillar, after doing at least 100 on the freeway." He paused.

"C'mon, Flack, don't keep me in suspense here." Her heart had already leapt up into her throat.

"The car is a total wreck, Stella, completely burned out."

"And ...?"

"And there are two male vics in the front seats. They weren't wearing seatbelts and were killed on impact. Apparently, it's quite a mess. Before you get too upset, I happen to know that the two NJSP officers on scene are very experienced cops. They estimate the two men as being _younger_ than Mac and the medic, most probably teenaged joyriders. But of course they can't be 100% sure, given the state of the bodies. I've already spoken to Sid about assisting in verifying their identities, and I'm about to head over to New Jersey myself now."

"Has anyone checked the trunk?" _Surely Flack has already thought about this possibility. So why hadn't he mentioned it?_

"No, the car rolled over and skidded sideways into the pillar, so they haven't been able to break it open yet. I want someone from your team to be there, when they do. Just in case - you know - this somehow still has something to do with Mac."

_Oh God, he really wasn't kidding. This is definitely not very promising. _"I've sent almost everyone home for the night, but Adam volunteered to be on call if something came up."

"Fine, whatever. As long as he knows what he is doing. Tell him I'll come by and pick him up on my way."

"He'll be fine. We are all professionals at the Crime Lab, remember?"

"Yes, I haven't forgotten, Stella," Don said and sighed. "Look, I'm sorry if I upset you. You're the best, and I think Mac is lucky to have you on his team. I really would have thought you already knew that."

"I know that, Don," she replied. "And I also know that Mac's lucky to have you as his friend. I'm really sorry I jumped down your throat - I was _way_ out of line there, of course. This day has just been so ... so ... unbelievably frustrating. I can't even _begin_ to describe it."

He exhaled loudly. "Yeah, you can say that again. It's been a regular rollercoaster ride so far, and I get this feeling it's not over yet." He paused. "We both know Mac's not a patient man, Stella. I keep thinking that he expects us to have worked this out _hours_ ago. It's driving me crazy."

"I know exactly what you mean," she replied thoughtfully. "What about the second lead?"

"Some do-gooder came into the precinct earlier with a long, detailed list of all of the drunk and disorderlies he wanted to report in his neighborhood, which is about eight blocks from the hospital. One of my officers happened to notice he had written that he saw two drunk men with blood-spattered clothing flagging down a minicab this morning. This would have been about an hour after Mac and the medic left the ER. As far as I can tell, their physical descriptions fit both Mac and the medic pretty well. Apparently, this guy saw a tall, young man walking together with a dazed, middle-aged man with a head injury, who seemed to be struggling to keep his balance. The witness saw the minicab driver help drag the injured man onto the back seat. I've got officers talking to this witness and trying to locate this minicab now, but it's not going to be easy at this hour of the night."

_Oh, my poor Mac, you're not getting any breaks at all today._ "Unbelievable!" Stella gasped. "If that _really_ was Mac, it's just beyond belief that no one tried to help him! First Patel mistook him for a drug addict, and now this guy thought he was just a senseless drunk."

"Yeah, it just makes me _sick_ to think that people react this way!" Don was quiet for a moment before continuing more wistfully. "Sometimes I think about leaving the City and going upstate to take up fly fishing."

Stella tried to picture this for a few seconds before laughing out loud. "Sorry Flack, I just can't see you standing alone in some remote mountain stream."

"Who said anything about going alone?" she heard him chuckle.

"I _really_ want to believe in this lead," she said thoughtfully, "but it's still ... Well, I'm not entirely sure that it _was_ Mac. I know Patel told us Mac could have wandered out of the hospital, but _eight_ blocks? Did the witness at least see the gurney?"

"Nope, sorry, he definitely saw both of them walking. We're already checking the area for the gurney." Don sighed again. "Well, why _couldn't_ it still be Mac? He's a marine, right? If _anyone_ could just get up and walk eight blocks after taking a beating like that, it would have to be Mac. People have made the mistake of underestimating him before."

"C'mon, Flack, that kind of stuff only happens on TV, not in real life," Stella said. "Mac's only human, just like you and me. I just wish everyone would stop going on about him being a marine. I think it's what gets him into trouble in the first place."

"I realize you think that, Stella, but it's also what makes him so resourceful. He saved my life with a shoelace, remember?"

"Yes, you're right, Flack." Stella was forever grateful that Don always knew the right thing to say. "I guess you still feel you owe him for that."

"Actually, from today on, I'm going to be carrying a shoelace in my pocket for him. You know, just in case."

Stella laughed again, relieved that her friendship with Don was back on track. "Well, I'm sure he'll be thrilled to hear that."

"Did you come up with any leads in Mac's old case files at the Lab?" he asked.

"Believe me, I've been over every possible angle, and I just _cannot_ find any connection in any of Mac's previous cases. But Sheldon has actually made a pretty convincing case that our perp was in fact stealing medication." She filled him in on what they had discovered about Mac's missing pills. "It doesn't explain everything, of course, but it might be the first piece of the puzzle."

Don sighed. "You know what that means, don't you? Even _more_ security problems at the hospital. If this guy has been stealing medication regularly, the NYPD should have been informed at some point. If not sooner, then at the very latest at our meeting today."

"From what we've seen at Angel of Mercy so far," she replied, "they really should have been _a lot_ more worried about our investigation. It was weird how they kept denying any wrongdoing at the meeting."

"I know," he said. "They seemed so ... smug. Like they were _sure_ we couldn't touch them. It can't _just_ be because they overheard us arguing in the lobby."

"_That_ stays between us, okay, Flack? Mac doesn't _ever_ need to find out that we screwed up."

Don laughed. "I guess we really need Mac around to keep us focused. It's pretty ironic, isn't it? Here we are worrying about _Mac_ losing it, when _we_ can't even keep it together ourselves."

"Yeah, I thought of that, too," she laughed. "How did it go with Sinclair today, by the way?"

"Uhm, you know what he's like, forever dragging his feet. Let's just concentrate on these two new leads for now. I'll call you in the morning if I have any more news."

She knew Don too well not to recognize the hesitation in his voice. "Flack, is there something you aren't telling me?"

"No, I'm just tired, that's all. It's been a long day. Don't worry about it, Stella. We've got the Chief's full support."

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><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 7 "Of course, you can trust me"<strong>

**Early Wednesday morning: Mac Taylor's point of view**

At Vince's house, Mac realizes that he is running out of time and continues to look for ways to save himself.

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><p>As before, please feel free to send me a review. I would love to hear from you all - also if you haven't reviewed before!<p> 


	7. Of course you can trust me

**Author's note: **Welcome back everyone, thanks very much for tuning in again! And three cheers for my reviewers: tlh45, Detective-Yellow-Turtle, mav32, Herrera, Lilmizmoz, gluegirl56, Carly Horne, AccidentalNaps and Erkiulis.

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><p><strong>Chapter 7 - "Of course you can trust me"<strong>

**Mac Taylor, early Wednesday morning**

"Hey, wake up! You look terrible this morning."

Mac Taylor woke up with a start at the sound of Vince's voice in his ear. Then he felt two fingers yank his eyelids open. The spinning blur was nauseating, and he quickly shut his eyes again.

"Go away," he growled, pushing Vince's hand away from his face. He _did_ actually feel much worse, as if the pain had somehow soaked deeper down into his body. When the room finally settled down again, he saw that he was still lying beside the radiator in Vince's kitchen.

Vince was squatting next to him, looking worried. "I thought you were a goner," he sighed. He stood up, turned the kitchen chair around again, and sat down, another beer already in his hand again.

A habitual insomniac, Mac found it disconcerting to have slept so soundly, but he had to admit that - without painkillers - sleep was his only refuge from the incessant headache. Instead of slowly regaining his strength as he had hoped, however, he felt more and more exhausted each time he woke up. Reluctantly, he had to face the fact that he was running out of time, and at some point very soon he would not be waking up at all. The irony of his situation was not lost on him. If he really had been back to the ER, then the team probably knew more about his injuries than he did, especially if they had x-rays and a CT scan. They had to be working from some kind of time frame for finding him, and he would have given anything to know what it was.

His dizziness was still overwhelming, and reluctantly he had to accept a helping hand from Vince to sit up. He ran his fingertips across the stitches on his forehead and under the bandage on his left side. Both wounds were still very sore, but at least the swelling on his forehead had finally gone down, which was relief. Rubbing his face with his hand, he noticed a small smear of fresh blood. A nosebleed? _Not good. _He wiped the blood away with his sleeve.

"C'mon, take these off, Vince," he said, rattling the handcuffs on his wrist. "I'm obviously not going anywhere in this state."

"I still don't trust you. You asked too many damned questions yesterday."

So it was a new day, but which day? Already it felt like he had been lying on this kitchen floor for a whole week. Events were beginning to blur together in his mind. _How long had it actually been?_ Checking the stubble on his face, he guessed twenty-four hours had gone by since he had shaved last. He remembered looking self-consciously at himself in the mirror, while Stella watched him shave. Suddenly, he missed her terribly, wishing he could feel her touching his face and kissing him one more time. If he wanted to see her again, he would have to pull himself together and somehow come up with a way to save himself, while he was still able.

"But I haven't done anything to you, Vince," he replied.

"You're planning it. I can see it in your eyes."

Mac glanced up at Vince's face. _Downright creepy_, he thought. _He keeps telling me what I'm thinking, and I still have no idea what's going on in his head._ This man was a beer-drinking time bomb just waiting to go off, which meant that Mac was running out of time in more than one sense. What he really needed to do was to have a look around the house for a useful weapon. "Just take the handcuffs off, and I'll prove to you that you can trust me."

"Not happening," Vince replied and shook his head. "Are you really sure those pills are helping you?" he asked, looking skeptical.

"Definitely. And I need to take two more, right now." Mac held out his hand. "In fact, just give me the last four pills."

"I don't know. You're already getting a double dose." Frowning, Vince pulled the pill bottle out of his shirt pocket and read the label. "I never exceed the prescribed dose myself. You'll just have to wait until tomorrow for the last two pills."

_Tomorrow! _He really couldn't afford to wait that long before Vince returned to the hospital. "C'mon, give me those pills now!"

"I don't care! It's _my_ call, and you're just going to have to wait. You _really_ are a difficult patient."

"Hey! I'm _not_ your patient, Vince," Mac growled irritably. "And _you're_ not a doctor, remember?"

"Sometimes I am."

Mac knew he wasn't widely known for his patience and in fact had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Surely, it has to be a particular cruel twist of fate to put him in the hands of someone like Vince?

"Jesus! Did _you_ just say -?" It hadn't occurred to Mac before now that if Vince had been dressed as an orderly when they met, he could have access to other hospital uniforms as well. "Are you _seriously_ telling me that you've been running around Angel of Mercy pretending to be a _doctor_? Because that's a _very_ dangerous thing to do!" Right then, he vowed that if he got out of this alive, he was going to make it his priority to put investigating the hospital at the top of Don's to-do-list.

"Don't worry. I always go right at the end of the night shift, and so far I've never been caught."

"No, you _idiot_!" Mac yelled, before doubling over from a sudden jolt of pain under the bandage on his left side. _Damn it!_ He could literally rupture something if he didn't curb his temper. "It's ... dangerous for ... the _patients_," he gasped.

"_You're_ the idiot!" Vince shouted back, leaping off his chair. "I just told you, I never exceed the prescribed dosage."

"You _still_ can't be doing that!" Mac yelled back. _Argh, no shouting allowed! Could this possibly get any worse? _Cradling his ribs with his arm, he took a few shallow breaths before continuing in a calmer voice. "Those patients are ... already getting their medication ... from _real_ doctors," he added through clenched teeth. "You're putting their lives in danger, Vince."

"_You_ don't get to tell me what to do!" Vince stood shaking his fist at Mac. "So just shut up!"

"Well, come over here and make me," Mac replied darkly. With any luck, Vince was angry enough now to let his guard down, finally giving Mac a chance to get at the gun.

"No need." Vince pulled the gun out from behind his back and sat down again. "I can make you shut up from over here."

_No fooling you. _Mac realized he had to give in. "Okay," he sighed, "just give me the damned pills, Vince."

"Oh? Just _listen_ to yourself!" Vince taunted. "_Now_ it's all right for me to give _you_ pills, but not anyone else? And you thought you could just ask for a _quadruple_ dose? You're crazy, you kow that? You don't make any sense at all."

"Well, maybe I'll have to explain it to you, one day," Mac muttered, unable to recall anyone _ever_ testing his limits like this before. "C'mon, Vince, you heard what the voice at the hospital told you to do. As my angel, you're supposed to take care of me." _Christ, I'm losing my mind now_, he thought. _I've just crossed some kind of invisible boundary and moved into Vince's world. If I don't watch out, I won't make it out of here again._

Vince got up and filled a glass with tap water before handing Mac two of the pills. Despite his nausea, Mac took a couple of eager gulps before Vince pulled the glass out of his hand again. More than ever, he desperately needed a way to get away from Vince and see more of the house.

"I need to go to the bathroom."

Vince considered this for a moment before retrieving the keys from his jeans pocket and tossing them to Mac. With Vince's gun aimed at his head, Mac unlocked the handcuffs around the radiator pipe and rose unsteadily to his feet. Vince snatched the keys back from Mac's hands before shoving him forward, the gun against the back of his neck now. With the handcuffs dangling from his wrist, Mac used his left hand to steady himself against the kitchen wall as he walked slowly towards the dark doorway. He kept his right arm nestled close to his body, mainly to protect his aching ribs, but also to keep the two pills from rolling out of his sweatshirt sleeve.

Once inside the bathroom, Mac slumped back against the closed door, enjoying his brief respite from Vince. _This was so much better._ Even with the door unlocked and Vince standing outside with a loaded gun, he was elated to have made it this far.

The feeling did not last long. Just like the kitchen, the bathroom was large and empty, and he immediately saw why Vince would trust him to be in there alone. Directly in front of him was a small sink with a mirror above it, on the left a simple shower with a floor drain, and on the right a toilet and two towels hanging from hooks on the wall. There was no razor, scissors, shower curtain, towel rail, drain cleaner or electrical appliances in the room. And, of course, Mac already knew that Vince kept his oversized stash of medication elsewhere in the house. He glanced up at the narrow window high up above the toilet. Even if he managed to haul himself up there, there were at least twenty three-inch nails embedded in the frame. _Vince really wasn't kidding about the windows._

Mac walked to the sink and held on with both hands to keep his balance. Looking at his own blurry image in the mirror, he could see why Vince had been worried. He really did look awful with the discolored welt across his forehead, the dark circles under his eyes, and the dried blood under his nostrils. He had definitely been in better shape the last time he looked at himself in the mirror. _It was a good thing Stella couldn't see him right now._ He leaned forward and studied the color of his bruise, guessing that 24 hours had passed now, which at least tallied with the last time he had shaved. _How much more than 24 hours did the team think he had left?_

He carefully shook the two pills out of his sleeve and put them with the first two in the pocket of his sweatpants. _Four down, two to go._ Maybe he could somehow reach the refrigerator and put the pills into Vince's food or drink. He would have to consider his timing carefully, however. If he was still handcuffed to the radiator when Vince dropped dead elsewhere in the house, it didn't sound like the neighbors would be much help. Even worse, if the pills didn't kill Vince instantly, and he somehow managed to stagger back into the kitchen, he could still shoot Mac before collapsing. The image of himself lying dead on Vince's kitchen floor chilled Mac once again. Maybe his best option was to get Vince to share a beer with him and try to slip the pills into the bottle unnoticed.

Squinting, he held up the handcuffs on his wrist and studied them closely. They were peculiarly old-fashioned, perhaps 20 years out of date, very solid, and unfortunately completely resistant to sabotage. He sighed and lowered his hand again. _There is something really strange about this house_, he thought, looking around the bathroom again. His many years with the Crime Lab had made him quite an expert on what houses revealed about their owners. Yet he would never have guessed that a young man lived here alone. It was as if time somehow stood still in Vince's house, and it made him feel uneasy. _Something terrible once happened here_, inexplicably crossed his mind.

Feeling sticky and sweaty, Mac had an irrational urge to wash the blood off himself. _I could really do with a shower_, he thought, glancing briefly to his left. _Back at my own place_. He turned on the sink tap and took a couple of minutes to clean up his face and hands as best he could. He even spent time trying to scrape the blood from under his fingernails, which he knew was completely pointless.

Suddenly, an unexpected wave of nausea overtook him, and he retched into the sink. _Damn!_ He really had to be in _serious _trouble if he was throwing up _water_. Looking down at the brownish liquid disappearing down the drain, he realized that his nosebleed must already have started while he had slept. _Not good at all. _He cast a disapproving glance at the pale face in the mirror. He was grateful that Don couldn't see him standing here, throwing up into a sink, right now. He knew his friend was forever assuming that he could withstand absolutely anything. _In-vince-ible. _Mac sighed and briefly closed his eyes. _Yeah, right._

Then he rinsed his mouth with the cold water, debating whether he should drink any more. Wary of the danger of dehydration, he finally took a few gulps, hoping to keep it down this time. He pulled down one of the towels, soaked it, and held it against the back of his neck, taking another look around the bathroom.

He could break off a shard from the mirror, using the towel to protect his hand. The glass looked thin and brittle, though, and he suspected the whole mirror would come crashing down into the sink, thereby alerting Vince outside. He considered unscrewing the toilet tank lid to try to hit Vince over the head, but with the mirror directly behind him, he couldn't hold anything behind his back when he opened the bathroom door. Mac's eyes fell on the remaining towel on the wall, and he recalled how as a marine he once had witnessed a man killed with a wet towel. _Well, he already had one of those in his hands._

Before leaving, Mac decided to have a final look at the shower, wondering if he was capable of wrenching any of the old plumbing loose. Squatting down, he ran his hands along the pipes leading along the floor from the sink to the shower, finding everything depressingly solidly attached. He noticed that the pipe directly below the shower was also scuffed and scratched, just like the radiator pipe in the kitchen. _What the hell went on in this house? _he wondered vaguely before getting up to leave.

When he opened the door, still holding the towel to his neck, he was met by the barrel of Vince's gun aimed right at his head.

"Hey!" He raised his hands defensively.

Without lowering the gun, Vince motioned for him to return to the kitchen and click the handcuffs back onto the radiator pipe. Mac did so and slid down until he was sitting with his back against the radiator again. Worn out from his walk to the bathroom, he sat for a while with his eyes closed, listening to the water dripping into the sink and the old fridge humming in the corner. For a moment, he couldn't tell if he was actually awake or not.

"Are we good? Can I trust you?" Vince asked him, getting no reply.

When Mac finally opened his eyes again, he was sitting alone in the kitchen. Vince's jacket was still hanging on the kitchen chair, and he guessed Vince probably hadn't left the house. If Vince made a habit of prowling around Angel of Mercy at night, it would make sense that he slept during the day. His back ached from sitting against the radiator, and Mac desperately wanted to lie down again. But he knew he had to use this opportunity to have a look around the kitchen without Vince watching him.

He reached over to Vince's jacket on the chair and felt inside its pockets. Finding only the fake hospital ID, he tucked it back into the pocket again, hoping that Vince would be needing it again very soon. Then he ran the handcuffs up the whole length of the radiator pipe and stood up unsteadily to examine the boarded-up window above. Getting nothing but a few splinters in his fingertips, he reluctantly concluded that the plywood had been nailed solidly into place. He glanced up at the curtain rod above the window, trying to size up its length. He could probably yank it down by pulling on the curtains. But even with his arms outstretched, he still wouldn't be able to reach any of the cupboards or drawers with the rod in his hands.

Next, he knelt down facing the wall and stretched out as far as he could to his right, trying to reach around the refrigerator to get at its handle. Not quite succeeding, he ran his fingers along the bottom of the fridge instead, retrieving a bottle cap, a broken rubber band and a blue magic marker from the dust below. With a deep sigh of frustration, he sat down again and studied the meager findings in his hand. _This is just ridiculous._ If he actually managed to take down Vince with these, it would definitely be a first in the history of the Crime Lab. He leaned back against the radiator, his headache pounding mercilessly. _What on earth could he do to save himself now? _

Finally, a simple idea formed in his mind, and he knew he had to act quickly while he still had the strength. When he was done, he lay down wearily next to the radiator, realizing that he might not have the strength to get up off the floor again. Now he had done all that he could, and the rest would have to be up to everyone else. Vince's final words drifted back into his mind. _Of course you can trust me, Vince._

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><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 8 "I always knew you two would get together<strong>"

**Wednesday afternoon: Don Flack's point of view**

In the next chapter, the _true_ villain of this story is revealed, to Don's horror. Fortunately, he gets unexpected help from a character only mentioned briefly so far. (Any guesses, anyone?)


	8. I always knew you two would get together

**Author's note: **As before, a very special thank you to those of you who were kind enough to review the previous chapter: mav32, tlh45, Lilmizmoz, Erkiulis, AccidentalNaps, SMACkedHuddy, gluegirl56, Mahala, lily moonlight and Owlover96.

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><p><strong>Chapter 8 - "I always knew you two would get together"<strong>

**Don Flack, Wednesday afternoon**

"With all due respect, Sir, I was _not_ referring to the size of the ER doctor's nose!"

Until his dying day, Don Flack would never forget his conversation with Chief Sinclair on Tuesday evening. He had harnessed every last ounce of self-control to curb his anger, repeatedly reminding himself to do only what was best for Mac right now. _Above all, do no harm._ How he had managed to leave Sinclair's office without an immediate suspension - or even arrest - was still completely beyond his comprehension.

Don always knew that his big mouth would get him into serious trouble one day, but what floored him was that it had happened at a time when Mac's_ life_ was on the line. All his life, Don had been proud to speak his mind, and it was one of the many qualities he admired in Mac as well. Yet somehow Mac had managed to deal with the Chief of Detectives without losing his job, which meant that he somehow also knew _how_ and _when_ to watch his tongue. Over the years, Mac had kept his frustrations to himself and shielded the Crime Lab staff from Sinclair's animosity. Only a few times - over a quiet beer - had he grumbled to Don, rolling his eyes and sighing. And yet Don had still never grasped the depth of the bad blood between these two men - until now.

When Don had entered Sinclair's office early Tuesday evening, the Chief had immediately cut him off and turned down his request for a press briefing without explanation. To Don's great surprise, Sinclair had then reprimanded him for having argued with Stella in the presence of the hospital executives and their lawyers. Don had worried that the incident would somehow be turned against them, but the speed at which the details had reached the Chief astounded him. Keeping his promise to Stella, Don had in fact driven directly from the hospital to Sinclair's office, and yet somehow the news had _still_ preceded him.

What had stung Don most of all was what Sinclair had said about _Mac_. Even now, driving back from New Jersey together with Adam, his ears still burned at the recollection of the Chief's spiteful words. Don vowed that he would never _ever_ breathe a word about this to Stella - or anyone else working with Mac at the Crime Lab.

"I realize this may sound harsh to you, Detective," Sinclair had said to him, "but _someone_ finally needs to say it. Taylor has had this coming to him for quite a while, in my opinion. As I see it, that man has been living on borrowed time for _years_."

Don had felt like someone had yanked the ground away from under him, knocking him right off his feet. His mouth had dropped open, and he had been glad he was already sitting down in a chair. _This can't really be happening!_

"Sir, you can't possibly mean -" he started, but Sinclair interrupted him.

"Of course, _I've_ always known that Taylor was a loose cannon, a potential liability for the NYPD. He's stubborn and uncompromising, two qualities that have made him an administrative nightmare. Lately, I've had trouble keeping him in his place, so the fact that this has happened to him really doesn't surprise me."

"For the record, Sir, I've worked with Mac for many years, and I've never -" Don blurted out.

"Well, then maybe _you_ can tell me what the hell was going through Taylor's mind?" Sinclair raised his voice and started shouting. "Because I'd _really_ like to know! Picking a fight _twice_ during a _single_ night! I always knew that, as a Marine, he was going to get himself into serious trouble one day. If I remember correctly, Taylor's been antagonizing people ever since he was a _kid_ in Chicago, for Christ's sake! Now, everyone is finally going to see what _I've_ been saying all along. This time, Taylor has gone too far!"

"Sir, with all due respect, I don't see how any of this relates to the media appeal that I'm requesting!" Don's mind was still doing mental somersaults in an attempt to take in what the Chief was telling him. His hands had grasped the armrests of his chair as if he were trying to throttle them. Too much was at stake here to give in to his runaway temper. He had to make sure he didn't say anything now that he would spend the rest of his life regretting.

"Detective, you have to understand that it's for Taylor's _own_ sake that I'm denying you a media appeal. Do you want tomorrow's papers to be filled with stories about his reckless behavior?" Sinclair looked thoughtful for a moment before sighing loudly. "Of course, if you never find him, it's going to be impossible to prevent these stories from reaching the press, anyway. Taylor has obviously _really_ pissed someone off this time, someone with a _lethal_ grudge against him."

At that point, Don had leapt to his feet and clutched Sinclair's desk with both hands, which was all he could do to avoid actually grabbing the Chief's lapels. Leaning right over the desk until his face was only inches from Sinclair's, he said firmly, "Actually, _Sir_, it's been clear right from the very beginning of our investigation that what happened has absolutely _nothing_ to do with Mac personally. _None_ of the evidence points to it having been a premeditated attack. And there are _no_ connections to any Mac's previous cases at the Crime Lab. We believe it was just a random attack - it could have happened to _anyone_!"

"Well, that's not what _I've_ heard, Detective!" the Chief had countered triumphantly. "I have it on good authority that you and Detective Bonasera are _not_ in agreement about this."

"We need to look closer at Angel of Mercy to find out how this could happen," Don replied, ignoring Sinclair's accusation. "We need your support to get more cooperation from the hospital management."

"Out of the question! How could the _hospital_ possibly be complicit in Taylor's abduction? I won't have its good name dragged into this in order to cover for your own unprofessional conduct. Their lawyers are already threatening to sue the NYPD if we don't desist immediately. Since you and Bonasera have absolutely no evidence to back up your allegations, I will suspend you both if you don't _immediately_ drop this line of inquiry."

"But the ER doctor has seen our suspect at the hospital several times earlier. We urgently need to find out -"

"Let me get this straight, Detective," Sinclair shouted. "Is this the ER doctor you've just told me you weren't making _racist_ remarks about, but calling a _liar _instead? Are you seriously telling me you're basing your allegations on his statement? You can't ask me to make a laughing stock of the entire NYPD by going public with this. And I will not jeopardize the reputation of a fine public hospital with your - frankly speaking - entirely unsubstantiated allegations."

And with those final words, Sinclair had dismissed him, waving his hand vaguely towards the door. Dazed, Don had stared at the Chief for a minute, seriously considering whether to vault over his desk and punch him in the face. Yet he had reluctantly accepted that he wouldn't be helping Mac if he gave Sinclair an excuse to suspend him from his job.

That night, Don had paced his apartment floor restlessly for hours before lying down on his bed, staring up at the ceiling in the dark. Finding the air stifling, he had finally leapt off his bed and flung open his bedroom window. Then he had turned a chair around to face the window and sat for a while with his feet propped up on the windowsill, a beer bottle in his hand, staring out into the night. Despite hearing a cacophony of car horns, engines, sirens and voices outside, he felt entirely alone in the world, and wondered if he was really awake or just dreaming. Somehow, he had fallen through some kind of portal taking him into a parallel world where everything was still the same, yet completely different. He wondered vaguely if Mac felt the same way down in whatever rabbit hole he had disappeared into.

Don retrieved his badge from his dresser and sat flipping it back and forth between his hands. He didn't suspect Sinclair of actually having _conspired_ to have Mac killed, but the Chief was clearly seizing the opportunity to get rid of the thorn in his side by obstructing their investigation. And Stella and Don had inadvertently given him just the ammunition he needed to do so. Don recognized Sinclair's innuendo about newspaper articles on Mac's recklessness as a thinly-veiled declaration of intent. If they never found Mac - or at least a motive for the attack - there was nothing to prevent Sinclair from spreading vicious rumors, thereby destroying Mac's reputation. No one would ever have a reason to doubt the word of the NYPD Chief of Detectives. With a heavy heart, Don acknowledged that there now was a _new_ possibility of an _even_ crueler fate for Mac than death. _Dishonor._ When Jess had died, Don had plummeted into the lower depths of despair, but this time there would be no one to yank him back. At any cost, he would have to protect Stella from what he knew to be her worst fear: that she may have contributed to Mac's fate after all. _It would kill her._

When the 2 a.m. call had come about the car crash in New Jersey, it had actually been a welcomed relief for Don. It wasn't strictly necessary to drive out there, but he desperately needed to stop brooding and get back to doing something to further their investigation. He called Stella, breaking the news about the car crash to her as gently as he could, before telling her about the new minicab lead that his officers had uncovered while he had been with Sinclair.

Don and Adam had arrived at the New Jersey crash site just as HTS officers were prying open the car's damaged trunk. Even on the shoulder of the busy interstate highway, several audible sighs of relief could be heard when it became clear that it was empty. Adam watched eagle-eyed while the NJSP team processed the car, looking for evidence that Mac had been in it, before leaving for the Office of Forensic Sciences. Don called Stella to update her and let her know they would be heading back around noon.

Stella had answered her phone surprisingly fast. "You sound tired, Flack, you need to get some rest. Sid's already at the State Medical Examiner's office in Trenton. They've only just started, but he's already given me 11 separate reasons why neither body could be Mac. Meet me at the Crime Lab when you're done in New Jersey."

Although he really was very tired, Don knew that Stella had also heard a hint of anguish in his voice. On their way back to the City, he realized that Adam had mistaken his glum demeanor for disapproval and was keeping his distance. Don could tell that the CSI had been working up the nerve to tell him what was on his mind all morning.

"There's one thing I just don't understand, Detective Flack," Adam finally said, as the New York skyline appeared in the distance. "If we hardly have any leads, then why haven't we made a public appeal for more witnesses yet?"

Scowling, Don glanced over at his passenger, realizing that Adam deserved some kind of explanation. "Sinclair just wants us to exhaust all other possibilities first. We're still looking for that minicab."

"Well, I'm not surprised, really," Adam chuckled to himself, shaking his head. "They sure kept that pretty quiet."

"Umh, yeah, I agree totally," Don replied hesitantly, unable to fathom what Adam was talking about. "You know what Sinclair's like," he added vaguely.

Adam was quiet for a few more minutes, staring out of the side window. "Actually, that's not what I meant."

Something in the young CSI's voice made Don take his eyes off the road to look at again. "Then what did you mean, Adam?"

"Well, hardly anyone knows this," Adam replied with a nervous laugh, "but Sinclair and the head of security at Angel of Mercy are actually brothers-in-law."

"What!" Don nearly swerved off the road, causing Adam to clutch the dashboard with both hands. "You have _got_ to be kidding me! Are you _sure_? How the hell do you know that?"

"My cousin was installing printers in the hospital director's office last week, when he happened to overhear -"

"If I weren't driving on the highway, I'd lean over and _kiss_ you right now!" Seeing Adam flinch in his seat again, Don laughed out loud. "Finally, someone tells me something I want to hear. But this just stays between you and me, okay? Promise me you won't breathe a word about this to _anyone_, Adam!"

After dropping off a skittish Adam at the Crime Lab, Don drove straight to the NYPD Headquarters, this time bypassing Sinclair's office and heading straight for Deputy Commissioner Roberts' instead. After enduring the hostile stare of Roberts' secretary for an hour while her boss was in a meeting, Don finally managed to buttonhole the Deputy Commissioner as he opened his door. Roberts seemed to recognize his name and ushered him into his office, telling his scowling secretary to hold all calls.

Frowning, the Deputy Commissioner listened silently to Don's account, his concern evident. "That's a _very_ serious allegation against one of my Chiefs, Detective," he said thoughtfully when Don had finished. "Taylor has mentioned to me that you're a good detective. But you _do_ realize I can't just remove Sinclair based on what you've told me, don't you? Everything is just circumstantial - you have no _real_ evidence. As I see it, it's just going to be your word against Sinclair's."

Don offered to be fitted up with a wire to get evidence incriminating Sinclair, but Roberts just shook his head. "That's not the way we do things around here, and you know it. I want Taylor back as much as you, so right now, your _number one priority_ is to find him. Once he's back safe, you can go looking for your smoking gun. In the meantime, _I'll_ authorize your media appeal, if you need me to."

Even though the Deputy Commissioner hadn't been able to offer him much, Don felt a deep sense of relief as he rode the elevator down from Robert's office. At least now he knew that if - God forbid! - they didn't manage to find Mac alive, they would still have an ally to help them safeguard his reputation. Although he was exhausted, Don resolved to keep his spirits up and throw all of his energy into following up on their single remaining lead, as well as the media appeal for witnesses. He focused his mind on the simplest of plans. One: Find Mac. Two: Get Mac's help to take down the Chief.

"Yo, Flack," Danny had shouted when Don arrived at the Crime Lab, looking around for Stella. "What the hell was going on, yesterday? You and Stella were really at each other's throats."

Flack's mind went blank for a second. So much had happened since then, he had already forgotten that their fateful argument had started down in the ER staff room. "We were under a lot of stress, Danny, and we still are," he replied truthfully. "We've only got _one_ lead left to go on. Stella's really concerned about Mac, and I guess she somehow still feels guilty about having made him stay the night."

"You should have heard her on the way to the hospital Monday night." Danny rolled his eyes and crossed his arms. "I really thought she was going to _slap_ Mac when we arrived. There definitely was a lot of _tension_ in that room." He sighed before adding, "That's why it's so weird that Lindsay keeps telling me she's seen Mac and Stella making eyes at each other."

"What? Mac and Stella as two lovesick teenagers?" Don laughed at the thought, glad to be relieved of some of his own tension. "C'mon, that's just them trying to stare each other down! Sure, they're made for each other, but they're always winding each other up. If they were ever going to do anything about it, they'd already have done it years ago."

"Oh, I totally agree," Danny replied with a smirk. "Stella's always telling Mac to be more careful, which gets his back up every time. But still, Lindsay -"

"Stella and Mac are two of the most _stubborn_ people I've ever met. I've watched them for years, and they're always letting their pride get in the way. Not like you and Lindsay. Pride doesn't seem to be an issue with you two, at all."

Danny made a sour face. "You know what, Flack, I'm not at all sure that was a compliment."

"C'mon, it's just chemistry 101, Danny," Don continued with a grin. "I should have thought you smart CSI guys would have worked that out by now. Mac and Stella will never get together, they're just too alike. Like two magnets constantly pushing each other away."

"That's physics, Flack, not chemistry," Danny said, sighing as he turned to get back to work. "I would have thought _you'd_ have worked that out by now."

_These CSI's_, Don thought as he walked away, _you've gotta love them_. _Thank God for Danny and everything else that still hasn't changed after Sinclair's bombshell yesterday._

Just then, Don's phone rang. It was Officer Harris with an update on the minicab. Don listened to the disheartening news and sighed. He'd have to leave for the NYPD Media Center now in order to make the early evening news reports, but what Harris just told him he would have to convey to Stella in person. He pulled out his phone and called her.

"Stella, I've just got some news on the minicab. Where are you?"

"I'm sorry, Flack. I've been talking to Sid, and I'm running late. I've only just pulled into the parking garage. What's up?"

"I'm actually on my way down now, heading off to the Media Center. I'll meet you down by your car."

"So Sinclair finally authorized the media appeal," she replied with an audibly sigh of relief. "About time, too, if you ask me. I guess I always knew he'd be sensible about it, in the end," she added before hanging up.

As he approached her car, Don could her pale face under the fluorescent ceiling lighting. "C'mon, Flack, I can't take the suspense much longer," she said. "What have you got?"

"Officer Harris managed to locate the minicab and get an address from the driver. He's been there for the last hour, talking to the younger of the two men seen by our witness, sorting out the misunderstanding. I'm sorry, Stella, but this lead is another dead end. It has nothing to do with Mac."

"What? I don't understand. Harris went there without backup? Without notifying you first? Why would he do that?"

"Because he recognized the address given to him by the cab driver."

"Well, how can _that_ be?" she asked impatiently.

"He also recognized this guy as soon as he opened the door. They already met once in the ER yesterday, Stella."

She shook her head as she leaned back against her car. "You've got to explain this to me."

"While canvassing for witnesses at the hospital, Harris took a statement from two drunk car crash victims. Remember Patel mentioning them to us? Their doctors had expressly told them _not_ to leave the hospital, but they just wandered off anyway."

"Oh, my God! Are you saying that they actually _were_ drunk, after all?" Don nodded silently, and Stella's eyes narrowed. "Wait, why is your officer _still_ talking to this guy? There's something else, isn't there?"

"Well, yes, there's more, I'm afraid," he conceded. "Just as Harris is about to leave again, this guy sheepishly asks him for help. Apparently, he's having trouble waking up his friend, who's lying on the kitchen floor."

"Oh, no," she said, slowly shaking her head, "you're not telling me that ..."

"Yes, Harris is waiting for someone from the M.E.'s office to confirm this, but it looks like the other man died of his concussion sometime during the night."

Stella exhaled audibly. "Sheldon _really_ wasn't kidding when he told us that head injuries were tricky, was he?" she exclaimed. "Damn it, Flack, we're talking about a guy who walked _eight_ blocks here. _Mac_ couldn't even have done that. Sheldon gave us 24 hours, and now -" she glanced down at her watch, her voice quivering, "- it's been nearly _36_ hours, and we still have no idea where he is, or even if he's still alive!" She suddenly went quiet, and then her eyes widened. "You know, the medic told Patel some pretty whopping lies in the ER yesterday. I'm thinking about that body in the kitchen. It couldn't somehow be ... are you sure it's not ...?"

"Harris has worked with Mac many times before," Don replied, guessing her thoughts immediately. "He _knows_ what he looks like. Trust me, Stella, it's _not_ Mac."

"Do you realize what this means?" she exclaimed. "That was our very last lead! Now we have nothing _at all_ left to go on! We'll never find him in time!"

Don was startled as Stella began to slide slowly down the side of her car, her knees buckling under her. At first he thought she had fainted, but then he saw she had brought her hands up over her face, sobbing quietly. By the time he caught her under her arms, she was already sitting against the tire of her car. He gently pulled her towards himself and slowly raised her up again. They stood for a minute in an amicable embrace, before she said in a half-whisper, "I just don't think I can take any more bad news."

He carefully wiped the tears from under her eyes. "Hey, hey, hey," he said softly. "Don't worry, Stella, Mac's a M-," he caught himself before continuing, "- strong guy. He'll hold out for us. I'm sure the media appeal this evening will give us new leads." She nodded and tried to smile. "C'mon, you're utterly exhausted," he continued soothingly. "We've been going non-stop since yesterday morning. You've skipped a night's sleep and are feeling -"

"Two nights, actually," she interrupted, finally giving him a weak smile. "I couldn't sleep after visiting Mac at the hospital Monday night. I realized there was something I needed to tell him. And now ... I don't know if I'll ever get the chance."

"Stella, I already know you're feel guilty about your argument. And I can understand that you want to make it up to Mac. But I'm sure he doesn't see it that way ..."

Stella looked confused, trying to comprehend what he was saying. "I wanted to tell him that I _love_ him, Flack," she sniffed, shaking her head. "And I can't believe that I am standing here telling _you_ this, instead of Mac."

_Say what?_ Don's mind backpedaled furiously while he beamed his biggest smile at her. "Good for you, Stella. I was just telling Danny earlier. I always knew you two would get together one day."

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><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 9 "I feel much better already"<strong>

**Late Wednesday night: Mac Taylor's point of view**

Mac gets into _serious_ trouble when Vince finds out he's a cop. Gulp.


	9. I feel much better already

**Author's note: **Thank you so much to those of you who kindly took the time to review the previous chapter: tlh45, mav32, Mahala, csiny96, Lilmizmoz (from Cyprus!), Erkiulis, gluegirl56, SMACkedHuddy, and last - but certainly not least - AccidentalNaps. You guys are doing all the hard work around here! ;) Special kudos to tlh45 for guessing early on that the media appeal would mean more trouble.

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 9 - "I feel much better already"<strong>

**Mac Taylor, late Wednesday night**

Late Wednesday night, Mac Taylor lay beside the radiator in Vince's kitchen staring up at the ceiling. His back ached from lying on the floor all day, but he was too sore to roll over on either side, and too dizzy to contemplate sitting up. His pounding headache had intensified and seemed to be lodged behind his eyes now, causing them to water. Wary of what could only be a serious concussion, he kept checking for another nosebleed, but it was hard to tell in the dark. Drifting in and out of sleep most of the day, he had woken up feeling sluggish and groggy in the early evening. Several times, he had even forgotten where he was, only to keep waking up to the same dreadful realization that he was still in Vince's kitchen. He was clearly running out of time.

Sweating and shivering at the same time, Mac was unable to get comfortable in the cool evening air flowing down from the broken window above him. He held the damp towel against his forehead, debating what to do about the fever, which reminded him of the time he had been hospitalized with pneumonia, a few years back. For some reason, Stella still smugly remembered that unfortunate incident far better than he did himself. Right now, his best option was probably to ask Vince for his own antibiotics, but that meant he risked abandoning his plan to get Vince to return to the hospital for more heart pills. Given his rising fever, the antibiotics would definitely buy him more time, but he still wasn't willing to give up what might be his only chance of being found.

Vince hadn't been back to the kitchen since the morning, and the house had been completely quiet all day. His jacket still hung on the kitchen chair, though, and Mac guessed that he was probably still asleep somewhere else in the house. In the late evening, Mac heard him switch on a television in the room next to the kitchen, and its dim glare fell through the open doorway into the unlit kitchen. For several hours Mac had lain on the floor watching the shadows from endless late-night shows dancing across the kitchen ceiling. Finally, he rested his arm across his eyes in an attempt to shut out the flickering lights, but he couldn't do anything about the infernal noise aggravating his headache. _Death by television. That would definitely be a first._ At some point, Vince had stopped channel surfing altogether, and Mac guessed that he had probably dozed off in front of his TV.

Mac knew he had to be one of the few people in the world who - handcuffed to a stranger's radiator - would be thinking so intensely about his workplace. _Why was it taking everyone so long to find him? _He wondered what possible leads could be available to Stella and Don. What evidence had he and Vince left behind before they disappeared from the hospital? And how on earth did they get from the hospital to Vince's house? Mac would have given anything to be able to look over the shoulders of his CSI team right now. Eventually, his feverish mind stopped speculating and drifted into a restless dream instead.

_He was back at the Crime Lab, striding purposefully down the hallway in the middle of the night. Every few yards, he stopped to try a light switch, but the green glow from the emergency exit signs remained the only lighting. Since he was sure Vince hadn't brought his gun to the hospital, Mac skipped the ballistics lab and headed straight for the trace lab, the lack of light barely slowing him down at all. Having spent so many of his waking hours here every day, he knew the exact location of every piece of equipment and furniture, and navigating around - even in near darkness - was easy for him. He quickly located the trace evidence tables, and ran his hands blindly across their surfaces. All were empty except one, which had what felt like crumpled clothing lying on it - the hospital uniforms. Damn, he knew about those already. _Was this really all the evidence the team had to go on?

_Suddenly his senses picked up the presence of someone else at the deserted lab. First he heard quiet footsteps and then the muffled swish of a glass door being pushed open. He recognized the sound of someone breathing, and realized that Vince must somehow have followed him to the lab. Yet unlike at Vince's house, he was on home ground here, and he felt no sense of panic, since he knew this place like the back of his hand. Without the slightest noise, Mac carefully slipped out the nearest glass door. He walked down the hallway, listening keenly to determine if he had indeed escaped unnoticed, or if Vince was following him. When he heard Vince's footsteps gaining behind him, he decided to cut past Adam's workstation in the adjacent lab. Carefully sidestepped Adam's wayward office chair, Mac had the distinct advantage of knowing that Adam never tidied away his stuff. Then he had the satisfaction of hearing Vince stumble and fall down with a crash and an ugly curse behind him. _

_Any smugness he may have felt disappeared instantly, however, when a shot rang out, shattering the glass wall on his left in a flash of light. _That damned gun!_ He desperately_ _needed to get to a phone before Vince succeeded in killing him. Covering his head with both arms, Mac ducked down and raced down the hallway towards his office, the echo of the gunshot still ringing in his ears. Aware of the running footsteps following right behind him, he flung open his office door and skidded across the floor to his desk. He clearly saw his desk phone in the dim light from the buildings across the street. He grabbed the receiver, ready to dial Stella's cell phone number. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of Vince's hand reaching for the door handle and pulling the glass door open. Then Mac glanced back across his desk and stopped dead. So far - apart from Vince stalking him, of course - everything at the Crime Lab had been exactly the way he remembered. But now something was different. He distinctly remembered keeping three unsolved case files lying on the corner of his desk, but now he saw the outline of a fourth file. _

_Mac slowly let the receiver drop and picked up the top file instead, surprised at how light it felt in his hand. _It had to be almost empty._ For a few seconds, his puzzled eyes met Vince's, who smiled coldly as he raised his arm and aimed his gun directly at Mac's head. Then Mac looked down at the file in his hand again, recognizing Stella's handwriting on the cover. _Why on earth would she put a new cold case file on his desk?_ His heart froze as he read the name that she had written on the cover. _

Mac opened his eyes with a gasp, aware that he had just overheard his own name mentioned on Vince's television. Suddenly, he was wide awake, all of his senses on full alert. A news anchor was reporting that, in New York City, the NYPD were asking witnesses to come forward in the abduction of the head of the New York Crime Lab. Detective Mac Taylor had apparently already been missing for nearly two days.

His mind raced to comprehend all the implications of what he had just heard at once. _Hadn't any witnesses come forward yet? How could no one have seen them leave the hospital? Why had the NYPD waited so long before appealing to the public? Were they actually nowhere near finding him?_

In his dazed state, it took Mac far too long to realize that Vince might have heard the news story, as well. The seconds ticked by while he waited for some kind of reaction from the other room. _Nothing_. He held his breath and waited a little longer. _Still nothing_. He had just convinced himself that Vince must still be asleep, when a shadow suddenly loomed in the doorway.

"Detective Mac Taylor, you betrayed me!" Vince's voice boomed out.

_Oh shit!_ Mac scrambled to push himself up off the floor before Vince made it around the kitchen table in the dark. Almost standing upright, he was grabbing for the curtain to bring down the curtain rod, when Vince's shoulder suddenly slammed into his chest, knocking him right off his feet. To avoid cracking his head on the radiator, Mac twisted his body and landed on his right shoulder instead, the handcuffs wrenching his wrist brutally. He cried out as an agonizing pain shot up his left arm into his shoulder like a jolt of electricity. Holding his breath, Mac rolled onto his back and braced his ribs, before kicking blindly upwards at Vince with both his feet. He managed to catch Vince on one of his knees and heard the man fall backwards into the fridge with an outraged yell. Mac rolled back on his side again, groping around blindly for the wet towel somewhere on the floor._ He had never expected to be defending himself in the dark, but somehow this still felt oddly familiar, as if they had done this before._

"You son-of-a-bitch!" Vince cursed as he struggled to get back on his feet again.

Mac quickly hooked one of the kitchen chairs with his right foot and pulled it in front of him. Vince stumbled over the chair, but somehow managed to recover, dropping to his knees on the floor next to Mac with a yelp of pain. Leaning over him, he grabbed Mac's throat roughly and placed a knee firmly on his chest.

"I trusted you, Mac, and now I find out you're a cop. They sent you to kill me!"

"Get. Off. Me," Mac gasped under Vince's knee, trying in vain to push him off his chest. "I can't breathe!" Even this close, the light from the TV in the other room was too dim for Mac to see Vince's expression clearly, but he could hear his heavy breathing close to his face. A forgotten memory from the laundry room floated back into his consciousness. _We've been through this once before. _

"They just showed my picture on TV," Vince yelled. "You've been planning this all along. You just attacked me!"

_I don't believe this!_ Mac stretched his right arm out to reach around Vince's waist, trying to grab the gun from his belt. Suddenly he felt a sharp, stinging blow right across his cheek and the bridge of his nose. _Too late._ He heard a click, and now Vince held the gun firmly down against his forehead. In recognition of his defeat, Mac stopped struggling and let his arm drop to the floor.

"I _knew_ I couldn't trust you!" Vince hissed in his ear. "I saw it in your eyes. You lied to me!"

"I swear ... I didn't know ... I was a cop!" Mac gasped through clenched teeth. He could try to get to the pills in his pocket, but to do that, he would somehow have to push Vince out of the way first. "_You're_ the one ... who lied to _me_. You said you ... were an _angel_ of mercy ... remember?"

"Well, I am!" Vince sounded confused, his hand easing its grip on Mac's throat enough for him to catch his breath again.

Grimacing, Mac pushed the hand away from his throat. "No, you only _think_ you're an angel. When we first met, you heard the woman with me say -"

"How many times do I have to tell you?" Vince whipped the gun across his face again. "You were _alone_, lying in a pool of blood in the laundry room, when I found you."

"Stop. Doing. That!" Mac blinked several times, trying to clear the blood from his eyes, while stars began dancing around the periphery of his vision. Talking Vince out of killing him was his last line of defense, but he knew he was on the verge of passing out from the blows jarring his head. "That's because _you_ attacked me! And you damned nearly killed me."

"What!" Vince's voice was deeply offended. "How can you even _say_ such a thing? I'm the one who saved your life!"

"No, Vince," Mac pointed wearily up at the stitches on his forehead, "_this_ man - whoever he was - saved my life!"

"No! That doctor told me _I_ saved your life, don't you remember? I never lied to you, Mac. I really _am_ your angel of mercy."

Mac stared up at his assailant, suddenly remembering that the doctor _had_ in fact told Vince he had saved Mac's life. But that didn't make any sense._ Was he losing his mind after all?_ "Vince, trust me on this, you're _not_ an angel. You're a very sick man, and if you let me go, I can help you." He bit his lower lip, wondering if this really was a wise move. He hadn't planned on telling Vince the truth, but his hand had literally been forced, and now he needed to try anything that could save him from Vince's wrath.

Vince thought for a few minutes, and then he suddenly pushed himself up off Mac's chest, leaving him breathless again. "Well," he said as he stood up, "as my father used to say, there's more than one way to skin a cat."

_What! Your father -? _It suddenly dawned on Mac who _else_ had been handcuffed in this house before him. But the realization evaporated again the second that Vince grabbed his broken wrist and started fiddling with the handcuffs. Mac yelled out and thrashed about in agony on the floor. Then Vince grasped him under his arms and began dragging him backwards across the kitchen floor.

_Not this again!_ Mac felt like he was reliving the same nightmare over and over. _This has also happened once before._ "Don't do this!" he cried out through clenched teeth, flinging out his arms and kicking his feet. He briefly managed to catch hold of one of the kitchen chairs, but it was knocked out of his hand again by the doorframe, as Vince dragged him out of the kitchen.

Once inside the bathroom, Vince dropped Mac onto the floor before switching on the ceiling lightbulb. The brightness stabbed into Mac's eyes, and he rolled over on his side, covering his face instinctively. Blinded, he somehow managed to push himself up on one knee and was just about to stand up, when Vince shoved him backwards into the shower, slamming his head onto the tiled wall behind him. Now the familiar ringing sound was back in Mac's ears again as he slid slowly down the wall, until he was sitting slumped in the corner of the shower. Dazed, he held his right hand up over his face to try to stem the blood flowing from his nose. Hearing Vince click the handcuffs in place on something below the shower, he tried in vain to recall what had been so significant about that particular stretch of pipe.

_Vince doesn't want to make a mess in the kitchen, so now he's going to shoot me in the shower instead. _Mac squinted to see if Vince already had the gun in his hand, but all he make out in front of him was an unearthly, dazzling brightness.

_So this was how it was going to end_, Mac thought miserably, shutting his eyes. Realizing that he had irreversibly failed to escape his fate, he could only think of one single regret left in his life. _Stella._ _They should have done something years ago._ Now that he knew Vince was going to shoot him, his fear of dying had suddenly disappeared. Fighting Vince had drained him of his remaining strength, and the prospect of never waking up again didn't fill him with such dread any longer. _Just get it over with._

_How ironic_, he thought. The CSI team wasn't going find his dead body on the kitchen floor, after all. And Vince wasn't going to leave him lying around in his bathroom, either. Based on his crime scene experience, Mac guessed that Vince would most likely bury his body in his backyard during the night. In that case, he would probably never be found, and Stella would have to live with the same lack of closure that had haunted him for years.

Then, while he was waiting for Vince to make his move, an even more depressing thought struck Mac. _What if none of this was really happening?_ _What if he hadn't actually survived the attack in the laundry room?_ He had felt all along that there was something strange about this house, as if he were stuck in an everlasting limbo. Somewhere along the way he had completely lost track of time, and everything seemed to be going in circles now. Maybe he was trapped in some kind of personal hell, with Vince as his very own avenging angel of death. That would mean that his torment would go on eternally. Even if Vince shot him here in the shower right now, he'd probably just wake up lying on the kitchen floor again in the morning. And he would forever be waiting for the team to find him, when in reality they weren't even looking.

Mac's gloomy thoughts were interrupted when Vince suddenly grabbed his ankles and yanked him down to the floor. Now he lay flat on his back, blinking up at the showerhead directly above him. Vince looked down at him with a smile. "You're going to feel so much better now, detective."

When the ice cold water hit his face, it took Mac a few seconds to realize that Vince hadn't shot him after all. He shut his eyes tightly and gasped instinctively, breathing in a mouthful of water. Spluttering and coughing painfully, he rolled his head left and right several times, trying to keep from inhaling any more water into his lungs. Desperate not to cough again, he quickly worked out how to shield his mouth and pinch his nose with the same hand.

"Can I trust you, Mac?" Vince was leaning over him again, shouting in his ear.

Keeping his hand clamped over his mouth, Mac nodded briefly, terrified of being just a few breaths away from drowning. _This is what you get for wishing for a shower in this creepy house. _For what seemed like an eternity, the cold water kept cascading down over him, and his clothes were soon completely drenched. At one point, Mac actually managed to raise himself up on his right elbow, but Vince just put a foot on his chest and easily pushed him back down. After that, a freezing numbness began settling in place of his pain, and soon he was too exhausted even to shiver. _What kind of marine drowns in the shower_? Glancing to his left, he saw Vince sitting motionless on the floor across from him, silently watching his torment. _C'mon, turn it off now!_ he pleaded with his eyes_._ _What are you waiting for?_

"Are we good?" Vince shouted above the roar of the water. "Can I trust you?"

His eyes closed now, Mac nodded again. _Whatever! As long as you turn the damned water off! _If anything in this house was going to continue forever and ever, he didn't want it to be _this_. "Yes," he finally burst out, "you can trust me, Vince!" _What on earth gave Vince the idea that they could have a conversation like this?_ By now, the hand he held over his mouth and nose was so numb that it felt like someone else's hand was trying to smother him. Gradually, his fingers began to lose their grip, one by one, until his hand finally slipped and his arm fell outstretched onto the floor. _This is it,_ he realized. _I can't do this any longer. _

At that moment, Vince got up off the floor, and the water stopped as suddenly as it had begun. For a while, the ringing in Mac's ears was replaced by the booming echo of the cascading water. Then there was a deafening silence, and all he could hear now was himself wheezing like an asthmatic. At least dehydration wasn't going to be an issue any longer, he thought.

"Feeling better already?"

Mac nodded once again, but actually sincerely this time. He was still unable to move, but his headache had receded, making him feel strangely clearheaded for the first time since arriving at Vince's house. The icy water had numbed the pain racking his body, and even the fire in his broken wrist was reduced to a dull throb. With any luck, the cold water might also have stopped his nosebleed. Whereas he just moments ago had abandoned all hope and practically buried his own body in the backyard, the prospect of survival was suddenly open to him again. The sense of relief at still being alive overwhelmed him, and his dazed mind struggled to recall what few options were still open to him. _Damn! The heart pills will have dissolved in my pocket_, he suddenly realized.

"Good, I knew this would help you, Mac. Now I'll show you that I really _am_ your angel."

_Now what? _Mac groaned, too worn out to grasp what Vince could possibly mean. He tried in vain to move his fingers, impatient for the numbness to wear off, so that he could try to get up off the floor again. Suddenly, before he could even think to react, Vince's fingers were inside his mouth, causing him to gag and splutter, but it was too late. The two tiny pills were already sliding down into the back of his throat.

"Those were the last two," Vince said cheerfully. "But if they _really_ do make you feel better, I'll be heading back to the hospital for more of those pills now."

Bracing himself, Mac felt an unnatural heat rising from the core of his body, as his heart began to race in his chest. A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he had a strange sensation of falling backwards through the bathroom floor. "I feel much better already," he gasped, feeling the world closing in on him.

* * *

><p><strong>Next up: Chapter 10 "I would never lie to you "<strong>

**Early Thursday morning: Stella Bonasera's point of view**

With the unexpected help of two characters mentioned before in this story (any guesses?), Stella and Don finally locate Vince's house. But is it already too late to save Mac?


	10. I would never lie to you

**Author's note: **A special thanks to those of you who were kind enough to review the previous chapter: mav32, Mahala, tlh45, rocksmacked, Lilmizmoz, AccidentalNaps, Erkiulis and gluegirl56.

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><p><strong>Chapter 10 - "I would never lie to you "<strong>

**Stella Bonasera, early Thursday morning**

Early Thursday morning, Stella Bonasera was lying awake in her bed, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about the latest turn of events. She hoped that Mac - wherever he was - was at least getting the rest he needed, because she wasn't going to get any until he was found. Nearly two days had gone by since his disappearance from Angel of Mercy, and now they were right back at square one, without any leads _at all_ as to his whereabouts. Everything depended entirely on potential eyewitnesses responding to Don's public appeal for witnesses early Wednesday evening. Yet although the NYPD had received several dozen calls from the public already, no reliable witnesses had come forward so far, and Stella's expectations were dwindling fast.

Throughout the evening, she had watched the television coverage of Mac's abduction unfold, hour by hour. As Don already had anticipated, the local press had been quick to see the newsworthiness of the story, which was bound to make a few headlines in the morning editions. As Stella left the Crime Lab around 10 p.m., several TV vans were parked in front of its entrance, and television crews were already busy taking up their positions. When she switched on her own TV set at home, she had the odd experience of watching herself slip out of the building behind a journalist reporting for a local channel. Quite unexpectedly, the story had also been picked up by a national news network, happy to fill a late night news void with a report on the shocking level of crime in New York City. Stella still hoped that the rapid escalation of the story in the media would somehow benefit their investigation.

After tossing in her bed for hours, she finally switched on her bedside light and sat up staring at her cell phone, willing it to ring. _C'mon!_ Suddenly the phone startled her by actually ringing in her hand, and she quickly glanced to check the time on her alarm clock. 4:44 a.m. Bracing herself mentally, Stella read the name of the caller. _Flack_. This had to be the break they were waiting for. _Good news or bad news?_

She flinched as she raised the phone to her ear, nearly deafened by the ear-splitting squad car siren howling the background. "Flack!" she cried out, her feet already hitting the floor as she leapt off her bed. "What's up?"

"Patel just phoned me!" she heard him shout to be heard above the siren. "He says our fake medic walked through the ER only minutes ago. I've already alerted hospital security and am on my way to Angel of Mercy with a dozen officers right now. I don't want you to get your _hopes_ up just yet, Stella. But if we _do_ catch this guy, I'm going to ask you to come down to the station to make a formal ID. Bring someone else along to process him. I want everything done by the book."

"Are you sure about this?" Stella replied, cradling the phone on her shoulder as she rushed around her bedroom to get dressed. "It doesn't make any sense for him to go back there now. You just released his sketch to the public last evening "

"Well, it must make sense somewhere in cloud cuckoo land!" Don replied before hanging up.

By the time Stella and Danny got to the precinct an hour later, restless police officers were milling around and the mood was tense. Looking grim, Don met them at the front desk and escorted them through the crowd towards the lock-up and interrogation rooms in the back.

"What's going on here, Flack?" Danny looked around, baffled by all the commotion. "Isn't your station a little overstaffed for this hour of the morning? Has the news of the arrest already been leaked to the media?"

"No, we're trying to keep a lid on it, but it's just a matter of time. A TV van just pulled up outside, and I've got an officer assigned just to take calls from the press." Don showed them into a small office. "You CSI's may not realize it, but Mac is a highly respected man around here, as well. When word got out here at the station that we had apprehended a suspect, the guys just started rallying round and showing up. Now they're grumbling because he's not cooperating. I've been trying to reach the captain to call everyone to order, before things get ugly."

"So, what? He's said nothing at all?" Stella asked nervously. "It's been nearly 48 hours, now. You know we can't afford to wait much longer."

"I know, but Mr. Chatterbox is keeping his mouth shut, and I think it's going to stay that way," Don shook his head. "Some of the guys have already suggested I take a walk so they can have a little 'chat' with him." Don picked up a piece of paper from the desk. "I need you to make a quick photo ID first, Stella."

Stella easily picked out the medic's face from the dozen photos on the page, relieved to see how much his picture matched the sketch she had helped make two days earlier. Then Don show them into room from which they could view the interrogation room through a one-way mirror. There she saw the handcuffed medic sitting on a chair, staring glumly down at the desk in front of him, while an officer stood guard behind him.

"This is what we found in his pockets." Don picked up a wooden tray from a desk. " It's not much to go on, really. A pretty hopeless fake hospital ID, four keys, and a few dollars in change. No wallet, no car keys, no bus or subway tickets stubs. We still have no idea how he gets around the city."

"Four keys?" Danny asked, carefully placing the items in separate plastic evidence bags. "What is he, some kind of janitor?"

"We caught him prowling around the geriatric ward, of all places," Don continued. "He gave an old lady the fright of her life. She literally had a heart attack, poor dear. In the ensuing commotion, our suspect managed to give the hospital security guards the slip. Luckily, I decided to head for the nearest disconnected fire door and caught up with him there. Would you _believe_ the alarms still hadn't been reset?"

"Somehow I'm not surprised," Stella replied. "Good for you, Flack."

"As you can see, he's wearing his street clothes," Don said, pointing at the man behind the glass. "And as you can imagine, he stuck out like a sore thumb at the hospital. He was very easy to spot, even at night." He paused. "I wondered about that, but we've still got the laundry room sealed off, so I guess he couldn't get to any of the hospital uniforms."

"It still doesn't make any sense," Stella replied. "Why go back there _now_? And why not just turn around, when he realizes he can't get at the uniforms? Why did he take the risk?"

"That's what I've been saying, Stella. The elevator doesn't go to the top floor." Don made a little loop at his temple with his index finger. "Oh yeah, that reminds me. His clothes are damp."

"What, you mean like sweaty?" Danny asked, wrinkling his nose.

"No, I think it's water."

_Water?_ Stella had an uneasy feeling that this couldn't be good. "Did it rain anywhere in the city during the night?"

"No, I already checked. And besides, his jacket is dry."

A terrible image intruded on Stella's thoughts. "Oh no," she gasped and tugged at Don's sleeve. "You don't think he threw Mac's body into the river, do you?"

"What, and then fell in himself?" Don shook his head. "Nah, I know it sounds a little weird, but it's more like the guy took a shower with his clothes on."

Danny left and got the officer to unlock the suspect's handcuffs before he began to process him, starting by scraping under his fingernails. Biting her own fingernails, Stella watched as the man then handed over his clothes and shoes to Danny, who meticulously bagged and tagged everything, before starting to photograph the man himself. She realized that she had completely overlooked the man's athletic build, which had been hidden by his loosely-fitting orderly uniform at the hospital. When the man zipped up the jumpsuit Danny had given him, Stella saw Danny place his camera on the table. He then leaned forward and said something almost inaudible to the suspect, pointing down at the knee he had just photographed.

With an outraged roar, the suspect lunged at Danny, shoving him backwards and sending him flying across the table into the back wall. Danny covered his head with both arms as the man dove across the table and landed partly on top of him. Stella followed Don as he raced to the interrogation room and flung open the door, arriving only seconds after two officers had yanked the suspect up and piled on top of him. While Stella helped Danny rise unsteadily to his feet, Don started pulling the officers off the suspect, yelling and swearing at everyone in the room. "Back _off_! Back off _now_!"

"Danny! Are you all right?" Stella shouted above the commotion behind her, her fingers already turning his face to get a closer look at the small, bloody cut above his eyebrow.

Danny nodded, staring down at what was left of his glasses in his hands. "I'm fine, really. Just shook up, that's all. I hope the camera survived."

"What the _hell_ did you say to him?" Don shouted as he secured the handcuffs on the suspect and rolled him onto his back. "Unbelievable!" he swore when he saw the man's bloody nose and groggy eyes. "They slammed his head on the floor! We're lucky if that's just a broken nose. Did you _threaten_ him, Danny?"

"C'mon, Flack, a little _credit_ here, okay?" Danny snapped back, offended by the question. "All I said was that he needed to go to hospital for medical treatment. Where's the threat in that? He's taken a serious blow to his knee - it looks to me like it's dislocated. He also has a welt down the length of his back. He has to be in a lot of pain. Sheldon will have to confirm this, of course, but both injuries look very recent to me."

"Flack!" Stella interrupted, spinning around to face him. "This didn't happen when you arrested him, did it?"

"Hey, what do you take me for, a Neanderthal?" Don huffed, equally offended. He shoved the two officers roughly out the door, ordering them to call in the EMS. "He was already limping at the hospital when I caught up with him."

"Maybe Mac did this to him," Stella speculated aloud, biting her lip. "In which case, we at least know he was still alive until recently." _But what has he done to Mac in return? _"I was really hoping Mac wouldn't pick a fight with this guy."

Don knelt down to check on the suspect again, before turning around to Stella and Danny. "I can't wait to transfer this bozo out of my custody. We're not going to get any more out of him now, so don't waste any more time here. Get back to the lab and process that stuff to see if it helps us find a location!"

Back at the Crime Lab, Stella and Danny were met by Sheldon and an anxious-looking Lindsay, who was already standing by with replacement glasses and a band-aid for her husband. Eager to get his hands on their first new leads, Danny refused to be sent home by the other three. Stella hadn't forgotten Don's concern about the chain of custody and left the work in the capable hands of the others, confident that if there was anything crucial to be found, they'd be sure to notice it.

Sheldon started by studying the photographs and trace evidence that Danny had brought from the suspect himself. In the meantime, Lindsay began meticulously processing the clothes, item by item, and Danny got going on the shoes, scraping their soles and analyzing the chemical composition.

"I'd like to be optimistic about this," he said to Stella, fiddling to adjust his new glasses, "but all I've got quartz, limestone, and some organic matter, for which I think the correct scientific term is 'New York City dirt'." He held up a shoe for Stella to see what he meant. "I guess I could try to check for DNA in the saliva on the chewing gum stuck here, but I gotta be honest, here. It's a _really_ long shot."

"Right now, this is all we've got," Stella replied with a sigh. "I think you'll have to follow it through."

At that moment, Lindsay tapped Stella on the shoulder. "Could you come over here, Stella? I've found something on the jacket, but I don't know what to make of it."

Stella followed Lindsay to the evidence table with the jacket on it. With a gloved finger, Lindsay pointed to the bottom of the inside lining of the jacket. "See, right here, 'PG&E 10036887856' written in blue magic marker. Do you think our suspect wrote it himself? Is it some kind of code?"

Stella pulled down the magnifying lamp and examined the sequence of letters and numbers closely. Suddenly it struck her. "Oh. My. God!" she exclaimed, her pounding heart making her feel lightheaded. _She didn't need a graphologist to tell her who had written the message!_ The handwriting was a little shaky, but she was _certain_ she had seen the letters G and E before. Without another word, she ran to Mac's office and spread out the three case files lying on the corner of his desk. There they were on the covers - the _same_ handwritten letters G and E, as on the jacket. Not only was Mac still _alive_, but he had just given them their first useful lead! _Mac had been playing it smart, after all. _Exhilarated, she sprinted back to the trace lab, where Danny and Lindsay were staring at her open-mouthed.

"Lindsay, go wake someone up at ConEd!" Stella shouted, pointing at the writing on the jacket. "I recognize this! It's a consumer number from an electricity meter."

Minutes later, Lindsay handed her a tablet with all the relevant information she had been able to pull up. Sheldon quickly retrieved his medical bag before racing together with Stella towards the elevators.

"Flack, we've got an address near Jackson Heights!" Stella shouted breathlessly into her phone. "Meet Sheldon and me there together with a couple of officers. Be sure to bring the EMS, as well. But, Flack," she added as an afterthought, "please pick _another_ hospital, this time."

"The property is registered to a Rodrigo Hernandez," she continued, reading from the tablet as they rode down to the parking garage. "He died of cancer three years ago at Angel of Mercy. Until then, Rodrigo lived at this address with his son, Vincent, who appears to fit the age and physical description of our suspect. Vincent was apparently diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late teens, but there's no indication of any medical follow-up since then. It also says here that Rodrigo had a registered handgun."

When everyone arrived in front of the Hernandez address half an hour later, Stella looked around as she stepped out of her car and approached the house. The warm glow of the early morning sunrise did little to improve on the dilapidated house in the rundown neighborhood. A pit bull terrier barked at them from behind a chain-linked fence across the street.

"This has got to be the right place," Don said tensely, pointing to the four locks on the front door. He motioned for one of the officers to break down the door. "NYPD! We're coming in!" he shouted, as they drew their guns and entered the house.

Quickly, they spread out to check the house, room by room. Following the sound of a television set, Stella walked across the threadbare carpets into a sparsely furnished living room. She picked up a large plastic bag filled with medication lying on the coffee table. _At least they had got one thing right. _As she turned off the TV, she looked around the room. If Vincent had in fact lived here alone for three years, he seemed to have made very few changes since his father died. Stella thought she could almost feel the presence of old man still in the house. Her brow creased when she noticed that all the windows were nailed shut. _What was going on here?_

Then she walked through a doorway into a large, dimly-lit kitchen with a boarded-up window, through which flowed the only fresh air in the whole house. Two kitchen chairs lay overturned, the refrigerator door was knocked off its hinge, and the curtain rod hung down at an angle, half-revealing an electricity meter beside the window. There was a bloody, wet towel lying on the floor near the radiator. _This must be where they fought._ Stella picked up a gun on the kitchen table and sniffed it, relieved to find that it hadn't been fired recently.

"Get the EMT in here _now_!" she suddenly heard one of the officers call out sharply.

By the time she and Don found the bathroom, Sheldon and the two paramedics were already kneeling on either side of Mac, checking his vitals. Sheldon was shining a pen light in his eyes, urgently calling his name, while the medics were rapidly pulling medical equipment from their bags.

Stella's hands flew up to her mouth to stifle a gasp. He looked so peaceful lying there, as if he were asleep, but his skin had a grayish-blue tinge she only associated with the morgue. The black stitches on his forehead stood out starkly against his pale skin, and the sweat suit she had brought him only two days earlier was now bloodstained and soaking wet. A trickle of blood ran from his nostrils, and there were cuts and bruises on his cheeks and nose.

"He looks -" Stella said anxiously. "Is he -?"

"They've got a pulse," Don replied, taking hold of her shoulders and gently pushing her backwards into the hallway. "Let Sheldon and the medics do what they're trained to do. And don't worry, Stella," he added softly, "these are _real_ medics this time."

Seeing that Mac's bluish, swollen wrist was handcuffed to a pipe, one of the officers retrieved bolt cutters from his squad car and silently passed them into the bathroom.

Don wrapped his arm tightly around her shoulder, while they watched helplessly as Sheldon and the two paramedics worked intensely, intubating, ventilating, attaching an IV, and monitoring Mac's irregular breathing and erratic heart rate. They both sensed the three health professional's unspoken concern about his unstable vitals.

"Flack, you're shaking," she whispered, unable to take her eyes off Mac's supine figure on the floor.

"I know," he replied and pulled something out of his pocket. Looking down, she saw that he was fiddling with something that looked somewhat like a rosary without beads. _A shoelace._

Looking over the heads of the men kneeling in the bathroom, her eyes caught the reflection of her own and Don's exhausted faces in the bathroom mirror. She recognized the terrible symmetry of Mac's ordeal - this had all started and ended in a bathroom. She recalled how she had watched Mac shave at the hospital two days ago, and she suddenly noticed the little pill bottle on the side of the sink. "Over there!" she shouted, pointing towards the sink. Sheldon quickly reached up to grab the bottle, checking its label before pulling a syringe from his medical bag.

Suddenly everything was happening really fast, and the paramedics moved Mac to a backboard and were rushing him out to the ambulance, calling his vitals and their ETA in to Bellevue. When Sheldon jumped into the ambulance to join them, Stella and Don regarded each other wearily, wordlessly opting to ride in back of one of the squad cars together instead of trying to drive themselves.

They sat in silence as the squad car sped through the early morning traffic, following closely behind the ambulance. During the whole ride to Bellevue, Don stared out of the window, holding Stella's hand tightly with one hand, his other hand clamped over his mouth. He didn't even look at her once, as they watched the others disappear into the ER with Mac's gurney. Walking like in a trance into the hospital building, they suddenly found themselves standing alone next to a vending machine in a brightly-lit waiting room.

Stella slumped down wearily on one of the chairs, while Don just stood there, staring down at his own feet on the floor. She didn't have to guess what was bothering him - she felt the same way. After two days and two nights of searching for Mac, there just didn't seem to be anything left to say. _It might still be too late after all_.

"You look tired, Flack," she finally said.

"Tired? I could curl up and sleep for a week. Right here on the floor."

"Then come and sit down next to me." She pointed to the chair next to hers, but he was thinking furiously and not listening.

"Stella, was the television turned on when we came into the house?"

Nodding, she knew exactly what he was getting at. _C'mon, Flack, you can't blame yourself for this!_

"What channel?"

"One of the national channels."

"The one with the story about Mac's abduction?"

Stella nodded again.

"So you _were_ right all along!" he finally burst out. "Vincent _didn't know_ that Mac was a cop And he would _never_ have found out, if I hadn't chosen to tell the whole world last night. Mac _didn't_ pick a fight with this guy. He had been holding out, until _I _told Vincent who he was. If Mac doesn't pull through, I'll never, _ever_ forgive myself! I swear I'll turn in my badge!"

"It's not your fault!" Stella replied. "I kept _pushing_ you to do it, and Sinclair authorized it. If you blame yourself, you've got to blame _us_ as well, right?" Don opened his mouth to say something, before changing his mind, looking miserable again.

Time trickled by slowly, and Stella tried to empty her mind of all thoughts to stop herself from looking at the clock every minute. Don was acting like a ticking bomb, and she didn't want him to blow, so she quickly called Danny and asked him to tell the team to hold off until they had more news about Mac. Then she called Don's captain at the precinct and told him to do everything in his power to keep the press away from the hospital.

Nearly two hours later, Sheldon finally walked into waiting room, his face ashen. "I'll be honest with you, but a lesser man would not have survive what Mac's been through. He's not out of the woods yet, but it looks like he'll pull through." He sat down heavily in the empty chair next to Stella. "I don't want to go into the details, but it's been touch and go all along. He's still critical, but much more stable now, so you'll be able to see him soon. They've drained the fluid from his lungs, but he'll be on a ventilator for a while yet. His wrist is a real mess, and he did have a hairline skull fracture. Everything still depends on the extent of his concussion. So we won't know anything for sure until he wakes up, but right now it looks like he'll recover. He really is surprisingly strong."

Stella knew Sheldon was weighing his words carefully not to give them false hopes, but she was happy to be comforted by them.

"All of Mac's new injuries are very recent," Sheldon continued. "I'd say he sustained them at the same time as Vincent. Probably some time during the night or very early this morning."

Stella braced herself as Don blew up. "Damn it! I _knew_ it!" he pounded his hand furiously against the vending machine. An angry nurse came rushing into the waiting room, threatening to call hospital security if he didn't calm down _immediately_.

"Hospital security? Hah!" Don replied, looking more and more like a caged animal. He sat down and put his head in his hands, while Sheldon took the nurse aside to calm her down. "I've killed Mac twice, now," Don muttered.

Stella knelt down in front of him and gently lifted his head until she was looking him straight in the eyes.

"Hey, Flack. The last time I checked, Mac hasn't been killed even _once_. Sheldon just told us."

Finally, Don nodded and sat up straight. "You're right." Stella sat down next to him and put her arm across his shoulder. She could tell that there had to be something else bothering him, but he wasn't going to share it with her.

"By the way, Stella, thanks for the literal heads up." Sheldon opened his bag and took out the bottle of heart medication from the Hernandez house. "These pills could easily have killed him, but we got to him just in time. Mac was very lucky."

"That's funny," Don said wearily, slumping back in his chair, "because I don't think he's going to see it that way."

"What I mean is that the pills could easily have killed him in his condition. But the hypothermia offset the effect of the pills."

"I can't even _begin_ to imagine what went down in that house. I'd still rather hand in my badge than ever look him in the eye again."

"C'mon, Flack, I can't let you take credit for that alone," Stella said, giving his shoulder a squeeze. "It was teamwork, remember? We let him down together."

"Hey, you two," Sheldon interrupted, "stop being so gloomy! I know you both did your best. No one let Mac down. I know the lab has really been on a roll lately, but sooner or later we were going to come across a case we couldn't solve. It's too bad it had to be this one, but I know Mac will understand when he wakes up."

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

"Is she all right?" Stella asked suddenly.

"Who?" Don asked, bewildered.

"The old lady with the heart attack."

"Yeah, she's fine. She was resuscitated immediately."

"Let me see that." Stella took the empty bottle from Sheldon's hand and studied the label. "What was her name?"

Don pulled his notebook out of his jacket pocket and flicked through the pages. "Gretchen Myers. Why do you ask?"

Stella smiled. _Oh Mac, you were being very smart. _"I know why Vincent went back to the hospital. I think Mac actually sent him back for more of these pills."

"If that's the case," Don said, whistling under his breath, "then I'm _way_ impressed. The he suddenly looked serious. "But it unfortunately also confirms something else we never knew about Mac. Something terrible that Patel revealed to us.""

"Oh?" she said, unable to guess what he could possibly mean. "What's that?"

"Mac's behaving like a drug addict, after all."

"I'll be sure to tell him you said that," Stella said, laughing out loud, before turning serious again. "Flack, is there something you're not telling me?"

"Never mind, Stella. It's something I need to share with Mac when he wakes up."

"You've had something on your mind for a while. Does it have anything to do with our argument at the hospital on Tuesday?"

"No, it doesn't, Stella, honestly." He saw that she was looking skeptically at him. "Hey, I would never lie to you."

_Well, Patel certainly was wrong about another thing, as well,_ Stella thought to herself. _Our colleagues lie to us all the time._

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><p><strong>Next up: Epilogue Part I "I never doubted you guys would find me"<strong>

**Friday noon, three weeks later: Stella Bonasera's point of view **

Mac is back, recovering in Stella's care and meeting up with the whole team again. We find out more about Vince's background. And a very big surprise awaits Mac. _(And, no, Stella is __not__ pregnant! They haven't exactly had time for any of __that__ ... yet!_)

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><p><strong>And then: Epilogue Part II "I haven't the slightest idea" (separate chapter)<strong>

**Friday noon, three weeks later: Stella Bonasera's point of view (continued)**

We hear how Mac and Don settled their unfinished business, and we find out what Mac and Stella decide to do about the unexpected news_._


	11. I never doubted you guys would find me

**Author's note: **We're so very close to the end now, except for a very long epilogue (in two parts) set three weeks later. Once again, I would like to thank everyone who has been patiently following this story, and a very special thank you to those of you who also very kindly reviewed the previous chapter: csiny96, mav32, Herrera, tlh45, SMACkedHuddy, gluegirl56, AccidentalNaps - and of course Mahala! I might never have gotten this far without _your_ wonderful support. :D

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><p><strong>Epilogue Part I - "I never doubted you guys would find me"<strong>

**Stella Bonasera, Friday noon, three weeks later**

"It's good to be back!"

No one in the New York Crime Lab boardroom - least of all Stella Bonasera - doubted the heartfelt sincerity of Mac's words on his first day back. Officially, he was still on sick leave, and would be so for at least another two or three weeks. But everyone knew it was going to be impossible to keep Mac away from the lab for that long.

As his interim replacement, Stella was briefing him regulary on all important issues, which meant he had no official reason to come by the lab just yet. The team had taken turns visiting him daily during his ten days at Bellevue, and Stella knew he had also met with Don several times since being discharged. But to everyone's delight, Mac had insisted on meeting up with the whole CSI team at the Crime Lab, and Don had made a special point of turning up as well. Stella watched as her excited colleagues crowded into the boardroom, greeting their boss with generous hugs and cautious backslaps. It didn't take long before everyone agreed to meet up again for drinks in the evening.

Sitting across from Mac at the boardroom table, Stella once again found herself watching him talk and smile, without really listening to his actual words. He still wore his left arm in a tight sling, but the little cuts and bruises on his face were gone, and he looked much less tired and pale. It was obvious to everyone that he was feeling a lot better and looking forward to getting back to work.

Stella knew that Mac was embarrassed about what had happened, and he still blamed himself entirely for having let his guard down that fateful Tuesday morning. While recovering at Bellevue, he had been happy to let the team close the case without him, showing no particular inclination to discuss his abduction or even press charges against Vincent. Given his head injury, no one was surprised to hear that he remembered very little of his ordeal and could offer them no explanation for _why_ Vincent had attacked him in the first place.

Stella didn't want Mac to regret his decision to drop by the lab, and so she had warned the others not to bring the details of his case up just yet. But somehow the topic had crept into their conversation anyway, and soon evidence photos and press clippings were spread out across the whole boardroom table. If Mac was uncomfortable with the situation, he didn't show it, and Stella realized what he probably had already understood: the team needed to talk the case through with him before they could move on.

"It's just so incredible, Mac!" Adam exclaimed. "We still have absolutely _no_ idea how you and Vincent got from the hospital to his house. You could have been beamed up by aliens, for all we know!"

"Well," Mac smiled and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, "that certainly _would_ explain why I don't remember anything."

"Just don't go telling the press about your little theory, Adam," Danny added with a smirk. "Or you'll single-handedly destroy the reputation of this Crime Lab. In which case, you'd better leave town, because Mac _will_ come looking for you!"

Everyone laughed, causing Adam's face to flush crimson. "But I would never -!" he blurted out, sending his boss a fearful glance.

Lindsay pointed to the impressive pile of press clippings they had gathered on the table. "It's just _unbelievable_ the stuff the papers are writing about you, Mac! I mean, you just cannot _buy_ this kind of publicity. Everything you've ever done, the many lives you've saved, it's all here! Lessing's West Village bomb, the Wilder gang drug bust, the Union International Bank heist. Now everyone knows what we've known all along - you're a real _hero_! No wonder we've had TV vans parked outside the Crime Lab the past few weeks."

Danny picked up a reprinted newspaper photo of Mac emerging from the Crime Lab in his black T-shirt after thwarting the Wilder gang's attempt to reclaim their drugs. "Someone looks a little bit _yooounger_ here -" he sang out happily, before Lindsay elbowed him to shut up.

Sighing deeply, Mac leaned back in his chair and ran his hand through his hair. "Unfortunately, I have no say in what they choose to write about me. I'm really sorry if all of this takes the focus away from the important work that everyone else is doing here at the Crime Lab. I can't _begin_ to tell you how much I look forward to all of this coming to an end soon."

"Chief Sinclair, on the other hand ..." Lindsay held up the latest newspaper editions, shaking her head ruefully. "His media relations officer has already resigned, and rumor has it that his own job is on the line now. The board at Angel of Mercy has fired its director and Sinclair's brother-in-law, but it's way too late, of course. The hospital has already been swamped with dozens of wrongful death lawsuits, even though there's no evidence that anyone actually _died_ because of what happened."

"Sinclair and his brother-in-law made their choices and are just going to have to live with them now," was Mac's terse response.

Danny held up a newspaper close-up photo of the lining of Vincent's jacket. "This photo has already gone viral on the internet. Everybody's talking about it, sending each other jacket-o-grams on Twitter!"

Mac took one long look at the photo and his eyes widened. "You have _got_ to be kidding me!" he exclaimed, before sending Stella a disapproving, I-don't-remember-you-telling-me-about-this look.

"Hey, it wasn't _my_ decision to make, Mac," she said, holding up her hands defensively.

During Mac's first few days at Bellevue, the jacket had become a popular attraction among the Crime Lab staff, and word about Mac's ingenuity had soon spread to the rest of the NYPD. At one of his meetings with Stella, Roberts had even asked to be shown the jacket, and then he suggested providing a photo of it to the press. At the time, Stella had been pleased that the Deputy Commissioner was taking such a personal interest in Mac's case, and she had happily complied, unaware of what Roberts actually had in mind for Mac. Sinclair had grumbled and questioned the wisdom of her decision, but he hadn't dared to overrule Stella, and the jacket had quickly made Mac Taylor a household name in New York City.

"Well, I don't know about you being a big _hero _and all, Mac," Don said with a grin. From his pocket, he pulled out a folded tabloid article headlined '_My midnight battle with Dr. Death_'. Underneath there was a photo of a frail-looking, yet smiling Mrs. Myers being hugged by her tearful family. "You nearly killed this old lady, sending that psycho back to steal her meds in the middle of the night."

Mac glanced wearily at the article. "Yeah, well," he sighed, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose, "I definitely hadn't seen _that_ coming."

"I wouldn't feel _too_ sorry for her, though," Don reassured him, "because her family is now taking the hospital to the cleaners for _millions_."

_Why do guys always do that?_ Stella wondered, sighing inwardly. She knew Don was pleased that his friendship with Mac was right back on track, and that he was just showing this by reverting to his usual friendly jibes. But she also knew the incident really _did_ bother Mac, and she decided it was time for her to change the subject.

"I propose we drink a toast to Dr. Patel tonight," she announced, kicking Don under the table. "This is the man who saved Mac's life - not just _once_, but _twice_ - despite Flack here doing his best to give the doctor a hard time."

Everyone started cheering and clapping for Patel, and this time it was Don's turn to look embarrassed. He threw an uncertain glance towards Mac, who just raised an eyebrow and smiled. "Oh, c'mon, you guys!" Don protested, raising his voice to drown out the others. "You should have heard him. He called Mac an addict!"

"Well, maybe Donald _Duck_ over there needs to learn how to control his temper," Danny quipped down from his end of the table.

"That may be so," Don replied with a grin, "but I know I'm still needed to keep _Mackey_ here - and all you little _mouseketeers_ - out of trouble!"

Once the laughter died down again, Sheldon addressed Mac more seriously. "I think Patel really did a good job on your forehead, by the way. Especially when you consider that you were fighting him at the time."

"I don't really think either of us have very fond memories of each other." Mac absent-mindedly ran his fingertips across his scar, as Stella had seen him do many times earlier, whenever the doctor's name had come up. "But, as Stella has reminded me, I guess I still owe Dr. Patel the courtesy of thanking him in person."

"In the meantime," Sheldon continued with a sigh, "I, too, have discovered what a difficult patient you can be, Mac."

"So everyone keeps telling me," Mac replied innocently.

"Wait till you see the overtime we've clocked up on your case," Sid exclaimed. "We may just have blown the lab's budget for the rest of the year."

"That's funny," Mac replied, "because I don't remember authorizing any overtime."

"No problem," Danny continued happily, "Big Mac here will just tell all the scumbags in New York City to lay low until the next budget year, or he'll kick their sorry asses. They'll have to listen to our new NYPD _super_ cop!"

"Great idea," Lindsay added. "That way, Flack and his boys get to take the rest of the year off, as well!"

Mac threw his hand in the air and sent Stella a helpless look, but she just joined the rest of the team in their laughter. They both knew that this was the price he was going to have to pay for his three-week absence from the lab. While she listened to their continued happy banter, Stella's thoughts drifted back to what had happened after they found Mac in the Hernandez house.

* * *

><p>After being admitted to Bellevue that Thursday morning, Mac had been unconscious in the ICU for three whole days, which Stella remembered as the worst three days of her life. Utterly exhausted, she had slept in a chair in his room, and the others had taken turns watching over both of them. Sheldon remained cautious in his evaluation of Mac's condition, refusing to make any promises he couldn't vouch for professionally. But Mac was steadily making progress, and on the second night he was taken off the ventilator without any complications.<p>

On the third night, Stella had pulled her chair closer to his bed and had fallen asleep with her head on his blanket. Startled to feel fingers playing with her hair, she had woken up around midnight to find him watching her.

"Missed you," he whispered, his eyes barely open.

Now it was her turn to startle him by bursting into tears. "Oh, Mac," she cried, "I missed you, too!" She put her hand on his face, gently caressing his cheek with her thumb. "We've been so worried about you."

The next time he woke up, she had moved her chair even closer, such that she had her face right next to his pillow. She sat resting her chin on her fists, taking comfort in the simple pleasure of watching him breathing steadily.

"What _are_ you doing?" he asked, blinking several times, the panic evident in his eyes.

"Watching you sleep," she replied softly, squeezing his right hand to reassure him.

He frowned. "Nasty habit."

"What, watching you? I love it."

"No, sleeping," he replied, and his eyes were already closed again.

"I love you, Mac," she whispered, uncertain whether he had heard her, but then she saw the corners of his mouth curl into a smile.

In the morning, Don and the rest of the CSI team had come to visit him, and Mac had endured their repeated jokes about his hardheadedness with surprising good humor. After ten days at Bellevue, however, he had grown moody and restless, and was desperate to get home. He was still far from a full recovery, but with Sheldon's intervention, his doctors had agreed to release him into his and Stella's care.

As Stella had anticipated, Mac bristled at the suggestion that he needed anyone to take care of him. But his injuries - especially his fractured wrist, which still required repeated surgery - made her help invaluable. So she had just left everything unsaid, and he hadn't protested when she showed up on his doorstep with a suitcase, effectively moving into his apartment. After a prim first night alone on his living room couch, she began sharing his bed as well.

Mac revealed very little to Stella about what had happened at Vincent's house, claiming his memory to be shaky, but her instincts told her he was holding something back. During the day, he was his normal - often grouchy - self, but at night he often woke up in a cold sweat, gasping for breath, unable to recognize where he was. Whenever this happened, she would switch on the bedside light and wrap her arms around him, waiting for his breathing to calm down. There was no doubt in her mind that he had actually believed he wouldn't survive his ordeal, and it saddened her to think that he had given up hope that they would find him in time. When he fell into a peaceful slumber again with his head resting on her shoulder, she knew how she could make up for the completely irrational sense of guilt that still nagged her.

"Good morning, sleepyhead," she greeted him after his first restless night back in his apartment. It was early afternoon, and he had wandered into his living room in his pajama pants.

"Still so damned tired," he muttered.

"Sheldon says it'll take _weeks_ for the effects of your concussion to wear off. Once you stop sleeping all together, we'll know you're back to normal." She smiled. Despite the frown on his face, she had to admit she liked what she saw. "How's your wrist today?"

With a wince, he raised his cast and wriggled his fingers very slightly for her to see. "Still attached."

"And your head?" she asked.

"Also still attached, I think," he sighed and rubbed his eyes wearily.

"And your heart?"

"Still very much attached, Stella." He reached around her waist and pulled her closer to him. Then he glanced down at the medication she had lined up on his dining table. "Sheesh," he exhaled loudly and slumped down onto one of the chairs. "I think I've developed an unexpected phobia. You really expect me to take all that?"

"No, Sheldon and your doctors at Bellevue expect you to take all that. _I_ expect you to resist." She stood behind his chair and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. "It's what's going to stop you from moping around this apartment any longer than necessary."

Looking up at her with a mischievous smile, he said, "I think I might also have developed an irrational fear of showers."

She kissed the top of his head, trying to smooth his tousled hair with her face. "You just concentrate on getting better, Mac," she laughed, "and I'll see what I can do to help you with that."

The one thing Stella wasn't able to help him with was the unrelenting media attention that his abduction had generated, the extent of which left him annoyed and bewildered. "Has the world gone _crazy_?" he exclaimed, when she had switched on the TV, only to discover his story featured on the evening news. "I didn't actually _do_ anything, except get hit on the head! Where's the story in _that_?"

"They're just connecting the dots, Mac," she replied, switching off the television again. "Just let the press do you a favor for a change. I think it's time you got some recognition. Flack has heard that some of the old stories about you are coming directly from Roberts' office."

"What on _earth_ is that man up to?" Mac asked, genuinely mystified. "How does he expect me to get back to work with that circus going on?"

To avoid attention, Mac started wearing his sunglasses whenever he left the apartment. Yet occasionally eagle-eyed reporters spotted his sling, and he would return to the apartment and slump against the door in exasperation. Stella knew he was meeting Don regularly, but he didn't offer to tell her why, and she decided not to ask, hoping that they were somehow dealing with whatever was troubling Don. Given the constant interest from the media, she and Mac agreed to keep their relationship discreet for the time being, and had made a habit of leaving his apartment separately. They had not even shared their news with the rest of the CSI team, instructing Don to keep quiet as well.

The secrecy about their relationship seemed to suit Mac just fine, but the arrangement bothered her. _What was the point of finally being together, if they couldn't live their lives openly?_ Standing in his living room one sunny afternoon, Stella looked down at a TV van parked in the street below. "We definitely have the worst timing in the entire history of relationships," she said sadly.

Mac laughed and handed her a mug of coffee. Making coffee on the machine was one of the few things he was still able to do for _her_ around the apartment, and she couldn't remember drinking this much coffee before in her life.

"_You're_ the one who keeps reassuring me that they'll forget all about all of this, soon enough," he replied.

She picked up his sunglasses from the coffee table and put them on. "I've been thinking, Mac. Maybe we should just walk out the front door holding hands. Just maybe I wouldn't mind posing for a magazine cover as your glamorous girlfriend." Seeing the look of horror on his face, she laughed and added, "Oh, that's just priceless! Don't be so prissy, I was just _kidding_."

"Come here," he said, removing the sunglasses before kissing her. "Just maybe I have another, very good reason to keep our relationship secret for now. Just trust me on this one, Stella."

Of course, there had never been a question of putting Vincent Hernandez on trial for his attack on - and abduction of - Mac. Once he had recovered sufficiently from his dislocated knee and broken nose, Vincent was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and committed to a secured psychiatric facility. Before he was put on anti-psychotic medication, he volunteered very little information, and afterwards he became apathetic and subdued, unable to answer any questions. Sheldon explained to everyone involved why it would be unethical to withhold Vincent's medication - even if it was only to get a statement - and why they would have to settle for Mac's sketchy account of what had happened. Only Stella knew that - while Vincent was _unable_ to tell them what really happened - Mac was _unwilling_. She realized the events at the Hernandez house were to remain locked into the minds of those two men.

Reluctantly, Stella had resigned herself to the fact that she might never know the full story of what had happened at the Hernandez house. After Frankie Mala, she had been in therapy for months herself, but Mac didn't appear to need to talk about what he had gone through. Given his nightmares, she knew he still had vivid memories, but she decided not to crowd him. Mac hadn't told Don anything either, who just shrugged, saying, "Well, it's a good thing he doesn't remember anything, right?" Stella resented the idea of the two of them being shut out, but she accepted that she was in love with a man who guarded his secrets carefully.

While Mac was still recovering at Bellevue, the team uncovered more information about Vincent's father, Rodrigo Hernandez, that helped shed light on Vincent's possible motive. Deeply suspicious of doctors and medication, Rodrigo had withdrawn his schizophrenic son from psychiatric treatment early on, and had instead decided to care for the troubled teenager himself. However, by nailing all the windows shut and putting four locks on the front door, he had unwittingly fed his son's growing paranoia, and Vincent's condition only deteriorated. When Rodrigo himself had fallen ill with cancer three years ago, Vincent had returned the favor by caring for his father without resorting to any medical advice or medication. By all accounts, Rodrigo had been of the same powerful build as his son, but by the time he was finally admitted to Angel of Mercy, he had weighed little over 100 pounds. He had died only days later, and Vincent had apparently never stopped visiting the hospital since then.

Sheldon managed to locate one of the Hernandez's former neighbors, who confirmed that Rodrigo had been a suspicious, brutal man, who had been seen browbeating his son several times. No one had ever been admitted to their house, though, and what exactly had gone on behind the sealed windows remained speculation. Ironically, the neighbor had also recalled seeing Rodrigo wave a gun in the face of a ConEd meter reader, which had meant that the old electricity meter in the kitchen never had been replaced by a more modern external meter.

When the extent of Mac's injuries - and his near-drowning - first became known, everyone involved in the case had been outraged at Vincent. Somehow, the news had spread like wildfire from Bellevue to the rest of the NYPD, and Don had been relieved to hear that Vincent was transferred from the precinct without further incident. There were only two notable exceptions who had not shared everyone else's anger. One had been Sheldon, who had just shrugged, reminding everyone that mental illness was still an illness, and that Vincent could not be held accountable for what he'd done. The other exception had been Mac himself.

After Mac's discharge from Bellevue, Sheldon dropped by his apartment frequently to check on his 'most stubborn patient ever'. Stella was dividing her days equally between running the lab and staying with Mac, and she often gave Sheldon a lift to the apartment. Whenever Sheldon examined Mac in the living room, Stella would retreat to the kitchen to give the two of them some privacy.

One afternoon, she was standing by the coffee machine in the kitchen, when she heard Mac in the living room complaining about Sheldon's penlight.

"Do you really have to shine that thing in my eyes _every_ time we meet?" he grumbled. "I worry you won't be able to break the habit again, once I'm back running the lab."

Sheldon laughed. "Mac, you're still recovering from a very serious head injury. If you go back to work before I give my go-ahead, then that's an indignity you'll just have to suffer."

"But I don't have _time_ for any more of this. It's been _two_ _weeks_ already!"

"Hey, not everything runs on Mac time, you know. You've just got to learn to be more patient."

"Remind me again why I don't just send you back to the M.E.'s office to unzip body bags for Sid?"

"Oh, that's easy enough, Mac," Sheldon laughed again. "If you do that, I'll never let you leave this apartment again."

Mac's muttered reply contained a few words that Stella didn't even know he had in his vocabulary.

Sheldon came into the kitchen for a quick coffee refill. While Stella poured him another cup, he pointed over his shoulder towards the living room. "Oh boy!" he whispered and rolled his eyes. "You deserve a special medal for this, Stella."

"Stella doesn't need a medal," they heard Mac growl in the living room. "She's enjoying this far too much."

"Well, I guess he just passed his hearing test. Nothing wrong there," she laughed. "Don't worry, Sheldon," she added with a smirk, "I knew exactly what I was getting myself into. Remember that time he had pneumonia, a few years ago? I guess spending all this _quality_ _time_ with Mac will just have to be a reward in itself." She knew Sheldon would assume she was joking, but Mac had actually been telling Sheldon the truth. The two of them were in fact greatly enjoying their private, little time-out together. Finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate on work, Stella began leaving the Crime Lab earlier and earlier every day, as Mac's health gradually improved and he slept less.

Later, Stella overhead Sheldon and Mac discussing Vincent's symptoms and prognosis, as if it were just another, completely unrelated case. Irritated that they could be so clinical about it, she decided to leave her kitchen exile and join their conversation in the living room.

"So, do you think Vincent attacked Mac because he somehow reminded him of his father?" she asked Sheldon.

"No, on the contrary," Sheldon replied. "Psychiatry is not my field, of course, but I don't think Vincent ever _resented_ his father, because his father kept him safe from the world, in his mind. I think Vincent started hoarding medication because he felt bad about not being able to save his father's life. Apparently, the doctors at Angel of Mercy told Vincent that his father died because _he_ hadn't brought him in soon enough, yet he somehow blamed _them_ for killing him. I'm speculating here, but I think Vincent didn't _realize_ that he had injured Mac himself at the hospital. He tried to help him the only way he knew how, which was to take him home to keep him safe from the doctors at the hospital."

Stella thought about it for a moment, trying to grasp the twisted logic of Vincent's mind. "But there's _still_ something that I don't understand," she replied. "Vincent didn't tell us very much at all before he started on his antipsychotic medication. Yet he _insisted_ that someone at the hospital _specifically_ told him to take care of Mac. Do we have any idea who that could be? Maybe someone with a grudge against Mac? Someone who knew just how _dangerous_ Vincent could be? I've spent hours searching old files for a possible suspect who could have wanted Mac killed, without any luck."

"No, sorry, Stella," Sheldon replied, shaking his head sadly. "We really don't know what Vincent meant by that."

Mac had been watching them silently, his face inscrutable, before changing the subject. "Sheldon, did you ever find anyone who could confirm that Rodrigo would handcuff his son to the radiator or use cold showers to subdue him?" he asked.

"No, I guess that'll just remain speculation, as well," Sheldon replied, shaking his head. "But it's not unlikely, given the evidence you saw at the house."

"Well, maybe Vince and I will be able to talk about it one day," Mac sighed. "If he ever gets off his medication again."

* * *

><p>Stella's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by Lindsay, who jumped up to turn on the large, wall-mounted television in the Crime Lab boardroom. "Hey, guys, it's just been confirmed!" she said, reading a text message on her cell phone. "Sinclair has <em>resigned<em>! I guess the bad press finally got to him. Who would _ever_ have guessed that it would come to this?"

_Oh, I can think of at least three people who knew this would happen_, Stella thought to herself. _And they didn't even get their hands dirty._ While everyone else's eyes were glued to the TV, she watched Mac and Don exchange silent glances, and Adam study the back of his hands under the table. She couldn't think of a more unlikely trio to plan the downfall of the Chief of Detectives.

"Well, good riddance," Danny muttered and slumped back in his chair. "Serves him right for being such an asshole. Imagine him trying to block our investigation of the hospital in order to cover for his brother-in-law!"

"Boy, the press really are having a field day with this story," Sheldon added, shaking his head. "I've heard that a woman has come forward claiming that Sinclair paid her to drop sexual harassment charges against him! And she says she's not the _only _one, so now the press are looking furiously for even more dirt to dig up on him."

Stella looked over at Don, who met her eyes with a reassuring smile before looking up at the television. She knew the two of them could only feel relief at the news, since Sinclair had come so close to ending their careers. However, they were not safe yet, because - for all they knew - the Chief might somehow still try to take them down with him.

Mac was trying hard to keep a straight face as he watched Sinclair angrily shoving his hand into the rolling cameras. Yet, watching him carefully, Stella saw the corners of his mouth curl into a wry smile. Finally, Mac put his hand over his mouth, but he wasn't able to cover up the twinkle in his eyes.

Don finally took his eyes off the screen and grinned at Mac. "You know, rumor has it that Roberts is thinking about offering to fast-track you into Sinclair's job."

Stella knew that the call from the Deputy Commissioner had already come earlier that same morning, so it surprised her that Mac just shook his head and smiled. "C'mon, Don, you know the Crime Lab doesn't deal with rumors," he replied coyly. "Everyone here already knows that I have no _intention_ of leaving the lab. But I think _you_ have some news you may want to share with the rest of us." It didn't escape Stella's attention how quickly he had managed to change the subject.

Don grinned from ear to ear. "The DA is looking into bringing a whole slew of criminal charges against Angel of Mercy. Roberts has _personally_ asked me to head up a special task force to investigate all the lapses in hospital security, and specifically the role of Sinclair's brother-in-law." There was an unmistakable pride in his voice. "I'll be picking my own team, and of course I'll be liaising with Stella until Mac's back in action again. So lets just say, I really hope you guys _haven't_ blown your budget for the rest of the year!"

"We look forward to working with you," Mac told him, clearly sharing his pride at the news. "Roberts was right to put you in charge of the investigation, Don."

Everyone congratulated Don and cheered at his good news, before begining to break up noisily to get back to work.

"Mac, it's just so good to have you back with us again," Sid said warmly. "We just knew you'd make it! I mean, you're a marine!"

Mac smiled and looked down at the table before answering, and the room fell silent in anticipation of his reply. "Thank you, Sid. I never doubted you guys would find me."

* * *

><p><strong>Next up: Epilogue Part II "I haven't the slightest idea"<strong>

**Friday noon, three weeks later: Stella Bonasera's point of view (continued)**

We hear how Mac and Don - with Adam's help - managed to bring down Sinclair without anybody suspecting them. Stella and Mac try to figure out a way to decide whether he should take the Deputy Commissioner up on his offer.


	12. I haven't the slightest idea

**Author's note: **We've finally come to the very last chapter of a very long story! I have been looking forward to sharing the ending with the rest of you. One last time, I would like to thank everyone who has read this far - and a very special thanks to those you you who also reviewed the previous chapter: tlh45, mav32, csiny96, Lilmizmoz, SMACkedHuddy, gluegirl56 and rocksmacked!

* * *

><p><strong>Epilogue - Part II "I haven't the slightest idea"<strong>

**Stella Bonasera, Friday noon, three weeks later (continued)**

After everyone else had left the boardroom, Stella Bonasera remained seated at the table, watching Mac again. There was no doubt in her mind that he had enjoyed coming by the Crime Lab to meet the team, but now he looked tired and his face was drawn. She was glad that Sheldon was keeping an eye on him, so they didn't have to take his own word for how he was feeling. As Don had walked out the door together with Danny, he had hummed a few bars of 'Hail to the Chief' under his breath, earning him a sharp look from Mac. Stella wondered if Roberts even realized the kind of pressure he was putting Mac under by pushing him towards Sinclair's job in this way.

Mac had picked up one of the black-and-white security camera photos from Angel of Mercy that had been left lying on the table. Stella recalled her own anxiety when she had first shown that photo to Patel in the ER staff room three weeks ago. She reminded herself that Mac hadn't seen the contents of his case file before and was still filling in the gaps in his memory. It had to be disconcerting for him to be confronted with images of Vincent's near-fatal attack on his life.

"You okay?" she asked him. Because Mac never complained about anything except being tired, he kept her guessing about his health most of the time. Sheldon had told her to look out for tell-tale signs of a headache, like whenever he started to squint or rub his eyes. Watching him now, Stella wondered reluctantly if she would be needing Sheldon to help her convince Mac to go home.

"I'm fine, just tired," was his not unexpected reply, but his frown stayed in place as he studied the photo closely.

"You have no idea how much everyone missed you around here."

"I know." He found some more surveillance photos and was rifling through them with one hand, comparing their respective time stamps.

Stella glanced up at the television showing the beleaguered Chief of Detectives now being bombarded by new questions from journalists. "The way this story is unfolding, minute by minute, the press are going to be grateful that they took an early interest in your abduction. They're going to be licking their lips every time they see you, ready to eat out of your hand."

"Yuck, that's disgusting," he replied, still studying the stack of photos in front of him.

"Well, it's still _nothing_ compared to where Sinclair's story is going now." She shook her head in disbelief. "I mean, I was almost getting used to the idea of those women claiming he paid them for their silence. But who would have thought there'd be _men _coming forward, as well?"

"Like I said," Mac replied wearily, "Sinclair made his choices and will have to live with them." He picked up a copy of his John Doe patient file and flipped through the pages. Squinting, he read over Patel's notes and looked at the photocopied x-rays, before holding up the near-empty file up for Stella to see. "What, no CT scan?"

Stella shook her head. "Roberts must be grateful that you and Flack took down Sinclair without getting your hands dirty. Roberts can't afford to have anyone suspect that you _intentionally_ destroyed the Chief's reputation."

"Roberts - and anyone else, for that matter - is welcome to come and check under our fingernails, if he wants."

"Well, that's _really_ saying something," Stella laughed, "coming from the head of the Crime Lab."

"As you know, Don and I are putting a lot of faith in Adam keeping quiet about this, as well."

"Adam would walk through fire for the two of you, as you already know, Mac," she reassured him. "You sure made your life a lot easier by getting rid of Sinclair."

"Well, maybe I decided life was too short to be dancing around with him every day."

"And now you'd rather be dancing around with _me_ for a change?"

"Maybe." Finally putting down the papers, Mac looked up at her and smiled. "Although, I seem to recall you giving me a hard time, as well."

"Ouch! Well, I seem to remember that I had a point. If your arm doesn't get any better, you're lucky that Roberts is offering you a cozy desk job." She punched his shoulder playfully, forgetting about the pins in his wrist.

"Ouch!" He winced and rubbed his arm, pretending to be offended. "Okay, point taken, Stella," he sighed.

"If Roberts wants to patch up the NYPD's reputation after Sinclair, it's pretty smart of him to offer you his job instead."

Mac frowned and rolled his eyes. "Well, apart from the fact that I'm not interested, and not remotely qualified, and I already have a job that I prefer, then, yes, it _is_ a very smart move."

"You and I both know that Roberts is not going to take 'no' for an answer."

"Yes, I realize that," he sighed, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. "But no one's going to tell me what to do. Not even Roberts," he growled irritably. "That's why I told him I'd think about it. He's given me 24 hours to make up my mind."

"So what exactly are you going to do, then?" Stella asked. _C'mon, Mac! How much longer are you going to keep me wondering?_

"I really don't know. Maybe I'll just take Don up on that fly fishing trip of his and just skip town tonight." He smiled wistfully at the thought, before adding, "As long as he doesn't bring along that shoelace he keeps dangling in my face ..."

"I think it's a great idea!" she exclaimed, perfectly aware that this wasn't going to be an option. "You could both do with a break from the city. How much trouble can you boys possibly get into while fishing, right?" She laughed. "Given how little you know about fly fishing, I'd say bring the shoelace along anyway. You might try to catch some fish with it instead."

She looked down to check her phone and saw a text message from the Crime Lab reception. Once again, the switchboard was jammed up. "With Sinclair's resignation running as breaking news on the local news channels, the press are out looking for you again. Are you ready for round two, Mac?"

"As ready as I'll ever be, I guess," he replied without any enthusiasm.

Stella thought back to how Mac had dealt with his first round with the press, only two days earlier. _You'll be just fine_,_ Mac,_ she thought. For the rest of her life, she would never forget the day she found out how Sinclair had attempted to obstruct their investigation.

* * *

><p>When Stella and Mac had been summoned to Sinclair's office three days earlier, she remembered thinking at the time that the meeting had been an utter disaster. Mac had been unusually irritable and moody, clearly tense about meeting Sinclair for the first time since leaving Bellevue. He hadn't said a word to her as they entered NYPD Headquarters, and just stared at his feet as they rode the elevator up to Sinclair's floor. Stella knew the two men had never seen eye to eye, and she just assumed that Mac wasn't looking forward to resuming their old arguments again. What she didn't realize, of course, was that he was bracing himself for a showdown with the man who had betrayed him.<p>

"Good to see you back, Taylor," Sinclair had said, smiling broadly and waving his hand towards the two chairs across from his desk. "You look surprisingly well."

"Glad to have your support," Mac replied, fixing the Chief with a withering stare as he sat down. "It has meant everything to me."

Fidgeting in his chair, Sinclair looked uncomfortably at Mac, and there had been a long, awkward silence in the room. Stella looked back and forth between the two men, immediately realizing that something was wrong. _What the hell was going on here?_

"Well," the Chief finally resumed, "I hope you've been resting comfortably, because we have some serious cleaning up to do ahead of us."

Scowling, Mac nodded very briefly before replying, "I agree entirely."

Mac's unwavering stare obviously made Sinclair ill at ease, but he launched into his attack regardless. "You _do_ realize that this messy business hasn't exactly benefited the NYPD, don't you? Now the whole nation seems to think that we're completely incompetent here in New York City, since it took us nearly three days to find you."

Mac didn't reply, but Stella had noticed how his right hand had tightened its grip on the armrest of his chair.

"And now the press are digging up old stories about you, making you out to be some kind of _hero_." Sinclair sighed wearily and pushed his office chair back into a reclining position. "What we really need, now, is for some of that good publicity to rub off on the rest of us." He sat up again suddenly, pointing an accusing finger at Mac. "You _owe_ it to us, Taylor, after what you've put us all through!"

Mac looked taken aback, and for a terrible moment Stella thought he would get up and punch the Chief in the face. But he appeared to change his mind and nodded reluctantly instead. "Okay, what did you have in mind?"

Sinclair handed him a single sheet of paper. "I had my media relations officer draft this for me, but he advised me that I can't make this statement on your behalf. Apparently, it'll be more effective coming from you."

As Mac read the press release, his frown deepened and the scar on his forehead turned an angry red. "Absolutely not!" he snapped. "First of all, I've already had enough media attention to last me a lifetime," he continued. "And secondly, there's no truth at all to any of this!"

Sinclair smiled overbearingly. "Welcome back to the real world, Taylor. This is called _politics_. P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S. At least have the sense to accept it."

Mac shook his head firmly. "No, this is called _spin._ S-P-I-N." He flicked the sheet of paper back onto Sinclair's desk. "At least have the courage to admit it."

Intrigued, Stella had reached for the press release and quickly read through it, while the two old enemies sat eyeing each other furiously across the Chief's desk.

"You can't possibly ask Mac to read this, Sir!" she burst out when she was done reading, unable to contain her outrage. "This statement gives credit to _no one_ at the NYPD, except yourself. And it goes out of its way to exonerate - even praise - the hospital. We urgently need to investigate how Vincent Hernandez could hang around Angel of Mercy unnoticed for three years. He as good as admitted to Mac that he has impersonated a doctor and administered medication to patients. And finally, it was _Detective_ _Flack_ who finally caught him, not the hospital security guards!"

"You have absolutely no evidence to back up your wild allegations, Bonasera," Sinclair countered. "The man you're referring to is a delusional schizophrenic. And I don't care what you think _you_ heard, Taylor," he pointed his finger angrily at Mac again. "You had a rather _nasty_ concussion at the time, or so I've been told. I've already checked with our lawyers, and anything you claim Hernandez told you will be inadmissible in court."

With a gasp, Stella glanced over at Mac, who just watched the Chief impassively, his hand over his mouth and murder in his eyes. _Had Mac somehow already expected this? How could that be?_

"There's just _no way_ I'm going to let you drag the name of a good public hospital through the mud," the Chief continued. "Do you realize that their lawyers are ready to sue the City of New York if you proceed with this slander? This is the last thing the NYPD needs right now! There is absolutely no way I'm letting you go ahead with any of this."

"Yes, but we still have to -" Stella started, before Sinclair interrupted her.

"If _you_ had spent more time investigating the case instead of having public arguments with Detective Flack, you might have located Taylor a lot sooner! It was for your own sakes that I didn't mention the two of you in this press release. Do you want your incompetence splashed out in tomorrow's headlines?"

Rolling his eyes, Mac quickly reached out to restrain Stella before she leapt out of her chair.

_So the news of their argument had traveled all the way to the Chief_, Stella realized to her chagrin. She wasn't all that surprised since three weeks had passed already, giving the hospital management plenty of time to lodge a formal complaint. What made her heart sink, though, was that she could tell by Mac's reaction that he already knew about their argument. _He should have heard this from me first_, she thought miserably.

"With all due respect, Sir," she replied as calmly as she could, "Detective Flack and I were arguing because of our lack of progress, _not_ the other way around."

"Well, that's not what _I_ heard, Bonasera. I have several witnesses who are prepared to swear that they heard you two discussing how to _tamper_ with the evidence and _intimidate_ witnesses." Sinclair raised his voice again to drown out Stella's protests. "I think it shows a complete _lack of respect_ to Taylor that you even considered such options. I've given this a lot of thought already, and I've made up my mind to suspend both of you immediately, while I initiate disciplinary action against you for your unprofessional conduct. You -"

"Enough!" During their heated exchange, Mac had watched in silence, but now he stood up and raised his hand, interrupting both of them in mid-sentence. "I am _entirely_ confident that Detectives Bonasera and Flack were completely _professional_ in their handling of the investigation. I can't see how I would have done anything differently myself." He paused briefly to make sure that he had the Chief's full attention. "There's no need for you to go further with these two detectives. In return, I promise I'll deliver the press statement as it stands."

"Good, Taylor, we have a deal!" Sinclair leaned back in his chair again, a smug smile back on his face. "I'm glad you've chosen to be sensible about this, after all."

Mac picked up the press release and left Sinclair's office without another word. For a moment, Stella stood staring open-mouthed at the triumphant-looking Chief before running after him.

"That went rather well, don't you think?" Mac huffed without looking back, striding down the hallway towards the elevators.

"That bastard!" she cried out as she followed him into an elevator. "I can't believe you're letting Sinclair blackmail you into doing this. I'm sorry, if you feel that Flack and I let you down. I had hoped this whole misunderstanding would have been sorted out before you returned."

"Well, I can't have you two kids squabbling every time I turn my back." He gave her that disapproving-father frown she hated so much, before stabbing the elevator button with his finger.

"I can't believe you just said that!" she exclaimed.

Mac turned around and faced her with a grin, reaching for her hand as the elevator doors closed. "Trust me, Stella, I know what I'm doing."

"Don't you _dare_ tease me like that, Mac!" she laughed, relieved. "I bet it was that little tattletale Flack who told you about our argument, wasn't it?"

"Well, from what he's told me, he's apparently quite a stickler for doing things by the book." He laughed out loud. "You really are two of the most hot-headed people I know. Somehow, you seem to set each other off, whenever I'm not around."

"I don't know what to say. I guess we really didn't do a good job of finding you."

"Hey, Stella, I actually meant what I said to Sinclair back there." He squeezed her hand reassuringly. "I couldn't have handled the case any better myself. I'm just really grateful that _I_ wasn't the one looking for _you_." He glanced down at the paper in his hand and smiled. "It's not the smoking gun we've been looking for, but Don is still going to love this."

"Mac, have you completely lost your mind!" Stella cried out, exasperated again. "Despite what Sinclair claims, nothing in that press release is true! And we can't do anything to investigate the hospital as long as he keeps blocking us." Her eyes narrowed as she tried to work out what he was planning. "Are you thinking of giving that press release to Roberts, to try to get him to reprimand Sinclair - maybe even _suspend_ him?"

"No, I intend to do something much worse," he replied, a hard glint in his eyes. "I'm going to keep my word."

At the press conference the next day, Mac started by announcing that the Chief of Detectives had personally asked him to make a statement. Then he read Sinclair's press release aloud, looking just awkward and uneasy enough for it to have exactly the opposite of its intended effect. The journalists in the room, sensing that he had somehow been coerced into praising Angel of Mercy and its management, immediately began asking detailed questions about the role of the hospital. Listening to their line of questioning and Mac's repeated "no comment", Stella wondered if he in fact hadn't already planned this outcome when he had first read the statement in Sinclair's office.

"You're playing a dangerous game there, Mac Taylor," she told him, as they pushed their way out of the crowded press room together, "making Sinclair look bad like that."

"Don't worry, Stella," he replied, slipping on his sunglasses while walking towards her car. "He can't touch me now, and he knows it. Believe me, he's going to have other things on his mind from now on."

_Well, Mac certainly hadn't lost his edge after his ordeal,_ she thought. _Quite on the contrary._ "I didn't think you - of all people - mastered the art of counter-spin."

"Is that even a word?" He looked skeptical. "Call it whatever you like. All I did was catch Sinclair overplaying his hand." He smiled reassuringly. "Just wait and see what happens now."

At breakfast the next morning, Mac handed her several newspapers with articles revealing the familial connection between Sinclair and head of security at Angel of Mercy. Some of the articles were already implying that this would give Sinclair a motive to block an investigation into hospital security. Stella saw how the journalists were doing their work for them, talking to both disgruntled hospital staff and worried patients and their relatives. There had been several instances of missing medication having gone unreported, and by now half a dozen witnesses had already recognized Vincent's picture.

As she gulped down a mouthful of toast with her coffee, Stella read an interview with a hard-pressed, frowning Detective Donald Flack Jr., whom journalists had managed to corner on the steps outside his own precinct. _Yes_, he could confirm that the Deputy Commissioner had authorized the media appeal. _No_, that was not normal departmental procedure. _Yes_, he had wondered about that himself, but it hadn't been his place to question a direct order from the Chief of Detectives. And so on.

"So Flack got _Roberts_ to authorize the media appeal, instead?" she exclaimed. "No wonder he's been beating himself up about it! He's still convinced he nearly killed you by doing so."

"I know," Mac replied, sighing as he pushed away a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal. "I've already spent hours trying to talk some sense into him. He's obviously been around _me_ too long."

"Was it one of you who told the press about Sinclair and his brother-in-law?"

"C'mon, Stella, I think you know me better than that!" he replied, offended by her question. "I think Don was probably tempted, but there was no need. Someone else got to have his 15 minutes of fame. Notice the family resemblance?"

Stella looked at the photo of a smiling, young IT consultant, who was named as the story's original whistleblower. _No wonder Adam's been so secretive and smug lately_, she thought. _He thinks he's James Bond now_.

"So now I know why you didn't want to go public with our relationship," she said. "You didn't want _Sinclair_ to find out, did you? But damn it, Mac, why didn't you at least tell me? Didn't you boys trust me with your secret?" She tried her best to look both reproachful and hurt at the same time.

"Well, for one thing, the evidence we had was circumstantial, and Roberts specifically asked Don to keep things quiet. What's more, I know you've been having regular meetings with Sinclair. What would you have done, had you known about this all along?"

"What, that Sinclair was ready to sacrifice your life for his brother-in-law's job?" She frowned, pretending to consider his question carefully for a moment. "I'd probably have marched right into his office and shot him in the head."

"Hm," Mac raised an eyebrow, studying her face carefully. "My point exactly, Stella. Not quite what I had in mind for either of you."

* * *

><p>Stella thoughts were interrupted when Mac got up and switched off the television in the Crime Lab boardroom. "Well, Sinclair was certainly right about one thing," he said with a sigh. "This whole mess has been entirely my fault."<p>

"Great, so the two of you _finally_ found something to agree on," she replied, shaking her head in disbelief. "Doesn't it matter to you _at _all that no one _else_ blames you for what happened? Anyone can be hit over the head by a lunatic, Mac, it doesn't require any special talent. Anyway, I feel guilty about what happened myself."

"Stella, that's just ridiculous!" he replied. She knew he would never accept that she or Don were in any way to blame for how they handled their investigation.

Stella knew there still was something he was holding back. "You know how I spent months talking to a shrink after Frankie - you signed off on it, after all. But you_ -_ on the other hand - have hardly said a word." _What wasn't he telling her?_

"Well, I'm not going to dwell on it. Even as a marine, I never ...," his voice trailed off. He stared out the window, lost in his thoughts for a moment, before continuing. "I guess, what I'm trying to say is ... that I _really_ thought ... I was going to lose my mind at that house."

His words made Stella shudder. _It had to have been really terrible, for Mac to say something like this_. "In that case, I just don't understand why you're not angrier at Vincent. He came so close to killing you twice - once in the laundry room and once in his bathroom."

"Oh, I've come to terms with the fact that Vince didn't know what he was doing. _Sinclair_, on the other hand, really puts things into perspective ..." Sighing deeply, he began rubbing his face absent-mindedly.

"Mac, I've been around you long enough to tell that you somehow blame _yourself_ for what happened at the Hernandez house."

"You're right, Stella," he conceded. "I was lying through my teeth to Vince the whole time. _That's_ probably what bothers me most. It's not how I would have handled things normally. I guess I'm mad at myself for not doing a better job of getting myself out of there."

"But, Mac, it was the right thing to do!" Stella exclaimed, exasperated by his stubbornness. "You survived _because_ you lied to Vincent. Think about it! You decided not to pick a fight with a homicidal maniac. While most people would have found that very _easy_ to do, it must have been quite an effort for you. I'm really proud of you!"

Mac rolled his eyes. "You know, I'm not entirely sure that was a compliment, Stella. I think you've been spending too much time with Don lately."

"Well, thank God you're such a convincing liar." She used to laugh whenever Don joked about Mac's poker face, but now she definitely had to take it more seriously. "You're always such a boy scout, Mac. I used to think you couldn't lie your way out of a paper bag."

"I obviously still can't lie my way out of a pair of handcuffs," he replied, shaking his head sadly. Then he noticed the mischievous smile creeping across her lips, and his eyes widened. "Hey, Stella," he laughed, putting his hand up defensively, "don't even _think_ of going there!"

"Well," she sighed, "while Roberts is ready to throw you a ticker-tape parade, everyone else around you seems to be watching their careers going down in flames. I know that _technically_ you kept your word to Sinclair, but I don't think he'll see it that way. He might still try to take Flack and me down with him. He has four witnesses who will testify that we were willing to falsify evidence and intimidate witnesses."

Mac smiled optimistically. "Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about that, if I were you, Stella. If Sinclair does try anything, we'll be ready for whatever he throws at us. I can easily protect both of you now." He shook his head with a grin. "You know, considering that I'm the one who screwed up in the first place, it is remarkable that I'm the only one coming out of this whole mess looking good."

_And you're looking damned good, Mac Taylor_, Stella thought to herself. _Somehow, you've managed to come out of this looking even better than before_. "Well, that's because you're the only one of us who actually played it smart, Mac."

He glanced down at the table, and his eyes fell on the Danny's photos of his own bloody handprints on the laundry room floor. Frowning once again, he picked up the photos and began looking at them closely.

"I believe we've still got some unfinished business," Stella said, getting up to stand next to him. "Something you've been putting off."

"Hm?" He wasn't listening any longer and glanced up at her absent-mindedly, still lost in his own thoughts.

"C'mon, Mac Taylor, let's do this."

Stella bent down, raised his chin with one hand, put her other hand behind his head, and kissed him like there was no tomorrow. If he had been surprised by her move, he recovered quickly, and there was nothing hesitant about the passion in his kiss. Putting his right arm around her waist, he gently pulled her down to sit on his knee, ignoring the whistles and clapping from their colleagues outside in the hallway. When she finally pulled herself back from the intensity of their kiss, Stella realized that the loudest wolf whistles had come from Don. She smiled and waved to their cheering audience outside the boardroom. Glancing up briefly, Mac made an unmistakable get-back-to-work signal with his thumb, which quickly dispersed the crowd.

"You don't seem to run a very tight ship around here, Minnie Mouse," he commented dryly, once everyone had left.

"I'm just giving them a break until you come back. They really deserve it." She laughed briefly before her smile faded. "Why do have this awful feeling those names are going to stick?"

"Right," he grumbled, scratching his head. "The prospect of running the lab again just got a lot more complicated with _that_ going on." He pointed over his shoulder towards the sound of happy shouting and laughter down the hallway.

"They'll get used to it. _You'll_ get used to it. It's not like they haven't suspected anything - I mean, we're all detectives! I've been living in your apartment ever since you left Bellevue!" She laughed at the idea that this could bother him so much. "Mac, I think you've just been through a much worse ordeal."

"Maybe. Just marginally," he replied, still looking worried. "This'll make dealing with the press again seem like a stroll in park."

A sudden thought struck her. "Oh no, Mac! You're not considering leaving the lab because of _us_?"

"Stella, there are _rules_ about these things, you know," he sighed. "And I seem to remember someone once reminding me - about a million years ago - that I'm not a young marine any longer. My future might very well depend on this, now." He pointed to the cast on his left arm. "Maybe it really _is_ time for me to move on." He sighed once again. "I know exactly what Don means when he says everything is still the same, yet completely different."

_Oh no, Mac, don't do this to me. It's not fair,_ Stella thought miserably. _I only meant that you should be taking better care of yourself._ "I was trying to warn you that you shouldn't go looking for trouble. I never meant for you to leave all of us here at the Crime Lab."

"Hey, Stella, I wouldn't be leaving _you_." Realizing that she was on the verge of tears, he quickly reached for her hand. "I'd _never_ leave you," he said gently, comforting her, and they sat silently holding hands for a few minutes.

"C'mon, let's clear all of this stuff up," she said, pulling herself together and standing up, "and then I'll take you out for lunch. My boss will be picking up the tab." She started gathering together the piles of papers on the table and putting them into a cardboard archive box.

"He sounds like a very generous man," Mac replied with a twinkle in his eye, getting up to join her. "I'd like to meet him some day."

"Well, then you'd better hurry! He won't be my boss for much longer - he's planning to leave his job."

"Sounds to me like an instant promotion for you. In which case, I think you'll find that he will _still_ be your boss. I happen to know that Roberts wants to have a word with you."

"Well, I was actually hoping you'd help me persuade him to stay."

"Stella, I _never_ ever expected to be in this situation." He bit his lip and sighed unhappily. "To be honest, I really don't know what to do now. I guess I have until tomorrow morning to find some way of working this out. I _will_ stay, of course, if you really want me to."

_This is not fair on you, Mac_, Stella suddenly realized. _You should be happy to be alive, to be respected by everyone around you, to be celebrated as a hero, to be heading for a major promotion, to be living with someone who loves you. Instead, you're feeling the weight of the world on your shoulders, fretting about how to do what's right for everyone_. He had just told her that he wasn't going to let _anyone_ - including Roberts - tell him what to do, and now here he was willing to let her decide his future for him. She realized that this had to be Mac's special way of telling her that he loved her. And if she really loved him back, she knew she would have to support him in making the right decision for _himself_, whatever her _own_ feelings were, whatever was best for the Crime Lab.

Stella decided to try to lighten his mood a little and put on her brightest smile. "Don't worry, Mac. We're in this together, and we'll figure something out together." Her head was already filled with a million different plans. "I've just decided to take the rest of the day off. I still owe you for that day together that we cancelled three million years ago."

"That's right!" His eyes lit up. "I never _did_ find out what you had planned for us."

"Well, I figured that it's finally time for me to help you with that _other_ of your supposed phobias."

His eyes widened in astonishment. "_That's_ how you're planning to help me make up my mind?"

"_Our_ minds," she corrected him gently, still smiling.

"Sheesh, Stella." He shook his head in disbelief, but didn't seem entirely averse to the idea. "Are you really suggesting we make important career decisions," he leaned forward and lowered his voice, "in the _shower_?"

"No need to whisper, Mac, there's no one around." She waved her hand at the empty hallway outside the boardroom. "See? You've already scared everyone back to work."

Looking around furtively, he laughed. "Well, I guess I keep expecting to see Sheldon lurking in the shadows with that damned penlight of his."

Pleased that he was willing to follow her lead, Stella started to giggle. "Well, why _not_ in the shower, Mac? For one thing, it'll clear our heads."

"Clear ... our _heads_?" He stared at her incredulously, still wondering what she was getting at. "I really don't think -"

"C'mon, Mac, it'll be _easy_," she interrupted happily, flashing another smile.

"_Easy_?" He put his hand over his eyes, presumably trying to clear his mind of the images she was conjuring up. Then he raised a few fingers and peered at her, grinning. "And how'd you figure that?"

"You know how sometimes you can be sitting at the office thinking about sex?"

His jaw dropped open. "Well, no, I've actually never ..." He trailed off, trying to look serious, but his smile kept creeping back onto his lips. "You're insane, Stella!"

"Well, this'll be exactly the _same_ thing," she laughed and grabbed his hand, "only the other way around."

Unable to keep a straight face any longer, he burst out laughing. "Damn it, Stella!" he said, clutching his side. "It still _hurts_ to laugh!"

At that moment, a lab technician wandered down the hallway and was horrified to see her boss doubled over in pain, wiping the tears from his eyes, while Stella laughed triumphantly. Stella and Mac's eyes met, and they silently agreed to pull themselves together, while the startled technician carefully backtracked the way she had come.

"Mac, it's like an aquarium around here," Stella said, catching her breath again. "Let's finish clearing away these files and go somewhere a little more private before we start any rumors."

"My thoughts exactly," he replied, pushing himself upright against the table. "Although I think the damage has already been done here."

Still grinning at each other, they resumed putting the remaining case file papers into the archive box. With his left arm immobilized in the sling, Mac made slow progress around the table, but Stella waited patiently for him to finish. She held out the box for him to drop the very last papers in, before placing the cardboard lid on top. Then she handed him a magic marker, and he wrote his name and the date on the lid.

Stella pointed to his name written in blue on the lid. "Mac, I'm so sorry that all of this had to happen to you. But I want you to know that I think your incredible Taylor luck hasn't run out, after all."

"That may be so, Stella." He put his hand over hers. "Given what's in this box, I count myself lucky that it's _my_ name on the lid, not _yours_."

As they left the boardroom together, she slipped her hand into his again. "I've known you for so many years now, Mac. How come I've never seen you laugh like that before? You should really do it more often."

He smiled and rolled his eyes. "That's because no one has ever suggested anything like _that_ to me before."

"What, really? _No one_?" she asked mischievously. "You expect me to believe that?"

"Well, _almost_ no one," he replied with a smirk, slipping his sunglasses on.

Holding hands, they walked down the hallway towards the elevators, trying to ignore the commotion behind them. As they stood facing the elevator doors, he absentmindedly put his hand on the back of her neck, caressing her skin very lightly with his thumb, under her hair. _Damn it, Mac, _she thought, feeling the electricity rush right down her spine._ You don't get to keep on playing innocent with me. You know exactly what you're doing._

"You _do_ realize that Sheldon isn't going to let you do any kind of work for at least another two-three weeks, don't you?" she asked him.

"Actually, I expect to be back in action Monday morning. I've already been on sick leave _way_ too long. As you're still formally Sheldon's boss, you should be able to fix that for me easily, Stella. I can't seem to get through to him myself."

"Well," she sighed, "I hate to break this to you, Mac, but Roberts has asked Sheldon to report directly to _him_, not _me_. Apparently, it's for everyone's protection, including you own."

"You have _got_ to be kidding me!" His face fell as he tried work out all the implications of what she had said. "Hey, surely I'm not _that_ bad, am I?"

"Mac, you _really_ have no idea, do you?" Stella rolled her eyes at him. "Roberts has been digging around in your old files himself. That's how he has found out for himself what you're like." She grinned. "Apparently Roberts didn't want you putting any undue pressure on anyone, especially me. Go figure! He seems to think we're ... close."

"Well, he's certainly right about that," he sighed, smiling at her. "And we're just about to get even closer."

"You've never had this much time on your hands before, Mac," she replied, smiling back at him. "Apart from fishing with Flack, what on earth are you going to do to fill up three work-free weeks now?"

"I haven't the slightest idea, Stella." He carefully pushed her curly locks behind her ear before kissing her tenderly, earning the two of them the second round of applause of the day.

-oOo- THE END -oOo-

* * *

><p>That's all, folks! I could just let this epilogue ramble on forever, but I'd better stop now, before I have to change this to a more mature rating.<p>

NB! I'd like to apologize to anyone who - like me - felt that I wasn't fair on Stella by keeping her in the dark for most of the story. This was only for the sake of the narrative. To compensate her, I've given her Mac and - possibly - his job as well, so I hope she finds it in her heart to forgive me.

It's been fun doing this. If any of you are considering publishing your first story on fanfiction, I'd say _go for it_ - I recommend it!

_Swarovski_


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